How do you do interprocess communication (IPC) in Rust?

Question

Is there part of the standard library for this?

I've been digging around, but I can't see anything immediately obvious that implements it, or anything on Process that would let you do this?

Did I miss it? Or do I have to do some C-wrapper work for this functionality?

(if so, is it 'safe' to serialize an object that is Send and pass it another process, then deserialize it there? That's what Send means right?)

TCP and UDP sockets are available, which in my mind allows for communicating between processes. Or do you mean a specific type of IPC? Maybe there are something existing you want to interoperate with? Are there any examples of IPC that you have in mind? — Shepmaster

Vladimir Matveev Vladimir Matveev · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-29T07:55:52

There is no single blessed way to do interprocess communication in Rust. You will need to use whatever technology you want: pipes, bare sockets (TCP or UDP), shared memory, nanomsg/ZeroMQ, whatever.

Also Send does not mean that you can serialize an object of a type which implements it and send to another process. It means that the data can be safely sent to another thread (e.g. it does not contain any references into the stack of the source thread), and it is not related to serialization.

For example, one of the basic forms of IPC are stdin/stdout pipes between parent and child processes. Process API allows you to send and receive data through these pipes:

use std::io::process::Command;

fn main() {
    let mut p = Command::new("tr").arg("a-z").arg("A-Z").spawn().unwrap();

    {
        let mut p_stdin = p.stdin.as_mut().unwrap();
        p_stdin.write_str("hello world").unwrap();
    }
    p.wait().unwrap().success();

    let response = p.stdout.as_mut().unwrap().read_to_string().unwrap();
    println!("Responded: {}", response);
}

Or you can use sockets, but the example would be quite large. You can find sockets API documentation here.

How do you do interprocess communication (IPC) in Rust?

2 Answers