Electron's Super Simple RPC (ESSRPC)

ESSRPC is a lightweight RPC library for Rust which aims to enable RPC calls as transparently as possible through calls to ordinary trait methods.

• Allows ordinary calls to trait methods to call an implementation across an RPC boundary (in another process, across the network, etc)
• Is agnostic to the underlying transport used.
• Uses only stable Rust.

The magic is performed by the essrpc attribute macro which may be applied to any trait whose functions each meet the following conditions:

• Returns a Result whose error type implements From<RPCError>.
• Uses only parameter and returns types which implement Serialize
• Is not unsafe

Please see the documentation for examples and more details.

Status

Alpha. Things are expected to work, but only a small amount of real world usage has occurred.

Configurable Features

• async_client: Enables asynchronous clients
• bincode_transport: Enables BincodeTransport
• json_transport: Enables JSONTransport
• wasm_bindgen: Enables wasm-bindgen compatibility. Specifically, UUID generation in the JSON transport uses wasm-bindgen compatible randomness.

Inspirations and Motivations

ESSRPC was inspired by tarpc and by the build_rpc_trait! macro from jsonrpc. Both of these are more mature projects. The recent stabilization of procedural macros allows ESSRPC to generate an RPC client/server pair from a more natural trait defintion. ESSRPC also makes fewer assumptions about the underlying RPC transport.