Interprocess communication toolkit for Rust programs. The crate aims to expose as many platform-specific features as possible while maintaining a uniform interface for all platforms.
- Cross-platform interprocess communication primitives:
- Unnamed pipes — anonymous file-like objects for communicating privately in one direction, most commonly used to communicate between a child process and its parent
- Local sockets — similar to TCP sockets, but use filesystem or namespaced paths instead of ports on
localhost, depending on the OS, bypassing the network stack entirely; implemented using named pipes on Windows and Unix domain sockets on Unix
- POSIX-specific interprocess communication primitives:
- FIFO files — special type of file which is similar to unnamed pipes but exists on the filesystem, often referred to as "named pipes" but completely different from Windows named pipes
- Unix domain sockets — a type of socket which is built around the standard networking APIs but uses filesystem paths instead of ports on
localhost, optionally using a spearate namespace on Linux akin to Windows named pipes - POSIX signals — used to receive short urgent messages from the OS and other programs, as well as sending those messages (practical usage, other than for compatibility reasons, is strongly discouraged)
- Windows-specific interprocess communication primitives:
- Named pipes — closely resembles Unix domain sockets, uses a separate namespace instead of on-drive paths
- C signals — like POSIX signals, but with less signal types and a smaller API (practical usage, other than for compatibility reasons, is strongly discouraged)
- Async support — efficient wrapper around local sockets, Windows named pipes and Ud-sockets for high-performance parallelism, currently only supports the Tokio runtime
This crate, along with all community contributions made to it, is dual-licensed under the terms of either the MIT license or the Apache 2.0 license.