Inter-Process Multiple Producer, Single Consumer Channels for Rust
This library provides a type-safe, high-performance inter-process channel
implementation based on a shared memory ring buffer. It uses
bincode for (de)serialization, including
zero-copy deserialization, making it ideal for messages with large &str or
&[u8] fields. And it has a name that rolls right off the tongue.
The examples directory contains a sender and receiver pair, which you can run in separate terminals like so:
cargo run --example ipmpsc-receive -- --zero-copy /tmp/ipmpsccargo run --example ipmpsc-send -- /tmp/ipmpscType some lines of text into the sender and observe that they are printed by the receiver. You can also run additional senders from other terminals -- the receiver will receive messages from any of them.
ipmpsc::Receiver::zero_copy_context, used in combination with
serde_bytes, is capable of supporting very
high bandwidth, low latency transfers (e.g. uncompressed video frames).
See the ipc-benchmarks subcrate for a few simple benchmarks that compare
ipmpsc to ipc_channel's high- and low-level interfaces. Here are the
results from my Ubuntu laptop:
test tests::bench_ipc_channel ... bench: 16,013,621 ns/iter (+/- 932,033)
test tests::bench_ipc_channel_bytes ... bench: 4,777,240 ns/iter (+/- 242,369)
test tests::bench_ipmpsc ... bench: 1,380,406 ns/iter (+/- 62,038)
The ring buffer is backed by a shared memory-mapped file, which means any process with access to that file can read from or write to it depending on its privileges. This may or may not be acceptable depending on the security needs of your application and the environment in which it runs.
Note that zero-copy deserialization can provide shared references to the mapped file, and internally ipmpsc uses both shared and unique references to segments of the file while reading from and writing to the ring buffer. These references are only safe if all processes which access the file obey Rust's memory safety rules (which normally only have meaning within a single process). ipmpsc itself should follow the rules (please report a bug if not), but safety cannot be guaranteed if any process fails to do so.
This library currently works on Linux, Android, and Windows. It does not work reliably on MacOS, unfortunately. See #4 for details. PRs to fix that are welcome!
ipc-channel - mature and robust IPC channels. Does not yet support Android, Windows, multiple simultaneous senders, or zero-copy deserialization.
shared_memory - low-level, cross-platform shared memory support. May be used as the basis for a ring-buffer based channel, but does not yet support Android.