microRPC is a minimal IPC / RPC framework that uses Protocol Buffers as the IDL to define messages and services, and it generates client and server stubs that operate over an abstract low-level transport mechanism.
For each service definition, and for each target language (currently only Rust), microRPC generates:
- a client object
- a server object
Additionally, the regular protobuf compiler is invoked to generate objects corresponding to individual messages; these are not specific to microRPC and follow standard protobuf format and APIs.
The client and server objects can connect to each other over a transport. A
transport consists of a single method, usually called invoke, which represents
an atomic invocation, sending a sequence of bytes and receiving a sequence of
bytes. microRPC takes care of translating a call on the client object to a
request messsage, serialize that to bytes, then on the server side deserialize
the bytes into the request message, and dispatching the user request to the
correct method on the server object, and similarly for the response path back to
the client.
See the microRPC Rust library for the definition of Transport in Rust.