benbrittain / rust-xdr

Generate Rust services from XDR RPC

rust-xdr  

Converts XDR RPC definitions into Rust Services

Description

rust-xdr is a framework for building Rust services from XDR RPC specifications. This is 2 parts

• serde_xdr: A serialization/deserialization library implemented ontop of serde. This is a stand-alone crate as well.
• rust-xdr: A code generator for tokio based services. This depends on serde_xdr for serialization and some of the runtime code.

Setup

Assuming a Rust/Cargo install

$ cargo install xdrgen
$ xdrgen --input <files that define your service or types> --output <directory>

If you are attempting to only use serde_xdr be aware that discrimant unions require extra serde annotations due to limitations of XDR. The examples directory shows how to properly annotate these if you are not codegening off a XDR file (which generates the annotations for you)

See the /examples directory.

Examples

• /examples/xdr_protocol_example/ shows how the XDR protocol implementation is primarily codegenned off the RPC XDR specification.

• /examples/rust_xdr_service shows how to implement a service. The main.rs & service.rs are hand written files. /examples/rust_xdr_service/xdrgen is the output directory of xdrgen.

  cargo run --bin rust-xdr -- -i examples/example_prot.v --output examples/service_example/xdrgen
  

Background

Built primarily during OkCupid Hack Week 2017, the goal of the project was to Proof Of Concept standing up Rust services that could easily interop with our existing C++ ones. Beyond building a typesafe (de)serialization library, we also wanted to automatically generate the the whole service, except for the implementation specific details for an RPC call.

Future Work

• Make serde_xdr a stand-alone crate
• Serialization of Option<> types as discriminant unions
• Prevent consumption of bytes in too small of packets
• OkCupid specific complilation flag for non-standard tweaks
• PoC client implementation
• Improve Error messages
• Implement more XDR rejection responses
• Test Suite

Contacts

Please file a github issue if you experience any problems

• Ben Brittain
• Brendon Scheinman

Specifications Implemented

• XDR - RFC4506
• RPC v2 - RFC1831

rust-xdr's Issues

Upgrade to newer Rust?

Hi there,

I have been trying to use this PoC code to generate some functioning code but since the blog post was written in 2017 most of the Rust ecosystem has changed and libraries it relied have evolved significantly (futures/tokio). So nothing works with an up to date Rust.

I am wondering what it would take to port some of the code to the newer APIs as I am interested in using Rust for a PoC with XDR RPC.

Thanks!

Thomas