Using Cap'n Proto for FFI

Jonah Beckford

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Aug 25, 2023, 11:32:32â€¯PM8/25/23

to Cap'n Proto

I have an implementation of FFI (foreign function interface) that uses Cap n' Proto. From a Cap n' Proto perspective it is analogous to Cap n' Proto RPC but "solves" sharing in-process objects between different languages rather than distributed messaging. You can read the announcement at https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ann-new-project-old-technique-dksdk-ffi-ocaml/12909 (the OCaml programming language discussion boards) if you'd like.

All the Cap n' Proto language bindings (ex. capn-ocaml) are important in the "DkSDK FFI" framework, but the most critical is the C language binding. Why? Plain old C is the best language to implement FFI that works across many languages. However, c-capnproto is unmaintainedÂ (https://github.com/opensourcerouting/c-capnproto/issues/55). So I forked c-capnproto, made several fixes, added support for MSVC and improved the test/build matrix. That fork is available atÂ https://gitlab.com/dkml/ext/c-capnproto. If no one has any objections it may be best to list that active fork as the C implementation on https://capnproto.org/otherlang.html.

Thanks! Jonah

Toyam Cox

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Aug 28, 2023, 6:27:50â€¯PM8/28/23

to Jonah Beckford, Cap'n Proto

I just want to say this is very cool, thank you.

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- Toyam

Kenton Varda

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Sep 6, 2023, 5:57:34â€¯PM9/6/23

to Jonah Beckford, Cap'n Proto

Hi Jonah,

Sorry for the very slow reply. This looks cool!

Thanks for taking over maintaining the C implementation -- I've added a link to the web site.