Flow-IPC Sub-project -- Core -- Basics, unstructured transport

This project is a sub-project of the larger Flow-IPC meta-project. Please see a similar README.md for Flow-IPC, first. You can most likely find it either in the parent directory to this one; or else in a sibling GitHub repository named ipc.git.

A more grounded description of the various sub-projects of Flow-IPC, including this one, can be found in ./src/ipc/common.hpp off the directory containing the present README. Look for Distributed sub-components (libraries) in a large C++ comment.

Took a look at those? Still interested in ipc_core as an independent entity? Then read on. Before you do though: it is, typically, both easier and more functional to simply treat Flow-IPC as a whole. To do so it is sufficient to never have to delve into topics discussed in this README. In particular the Flow-IPC generated documentation guided Manual + Reference are monolithic and cover all the sub-projects together, including this one.

Still interested? Then read on.

ipc_core depends on flow and no other ipc_* components. It provides ipc::util and ipc::transport (excluding ipc::transport::struc). Therefore, it's got the basics (such as util::Native_handle and util::Shared_name) and unstructured data transport: Unix domain sockets, POSIX MQs, and a few other items of this nature. It may well be useful to many application in its own right: certainly decent native and Boost-y APIs exist for access to these low-level resources, but generally not in a particularly convenient or consistent way; for example message boundaries are not consistently implemented, and names/addresses are a mess. ipc_core is nicer.

Arguably more importantly, however, ipc_core is the dependency of all other ipc_* components. In particular structured-data transport features of ipc::transport::struc are built on a foundation of of ipc_core-contained low-level unstructured (blob and native-handle) transport features.

Documentation

See Flow-IPC meta-project's README.md Documentation section. ipc_core lacks its own generated documentation. However, it contributes to the aforementioned monolithic documentation through its many comments which can (of course) be found directly in its code (./src/ipc/...). (The monolithic generated documentation scans these comments using Doxygen, combined with its siblings' comments... and so on.)

Obtaining the source code

• As a tarball/zip: The project web site links to individual releases with notes, docs, download links. We are included in a subdirectory off the Flow-IPC root.
• Via Git:
  • git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:Flow-IPC/ipc.git; or
  • git clone git@github.com:Flow-IPC/ipc_core.git

Installation

See INSTALL guide.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING guide.