This is an attempt to make the fastest IPC on the planet! One use case could be streaming audio/video between applications, where you need high performance and low latency. There are no allocations in the code and it's suitable for real-time usage.
Limitations: The ringbuffer capacity cannot be changed after creation, and
it works only on Copy types.
The ringbuffer is single producer and single consumer, but the producer and
the consumer can be different threads, and even different processes (if the
ringbuffer points to shared memory).
While primarily designed for Linux, there's no mandatory dependency that makes it Linux only (except for some benchmarks that only run under Linux).
Just sending a few bytes in every message, so the number of memory copies don't matter much?
Just use a std::io::pipe.
Want something more flexible, with a message bus daemon, signals, RPC, etc? Try the D-Bus.
First, you need to allocate memory for your buffer in the way you prefer.
Use ringbuf::channel_size to figure out how much memory the buffer needs.
Second, decide if you want a ringbuf::channel or a fdbuf::channel - you probably
want the fdbuf, but in case you want to do the signalling manually, you can use
the ringbuf.
The sender side can call the send method which takes a closure as argument. You will get
a mutable slice to fill with your data. Note that since this is a ringbuffer that avoids
memory copies, the closure might need to be called twice to fill it completely.
The same applies to the receiver side, which calls the recv method. Your closure needs to
return how many items the closure has read (for recv) or written (for send).
If the buffer is empty (and only then), the receiver side will be woken up when data can be read from the
buffer. Similar, if the buffer is full (and only then), the sender side will be woken up when more data
can be written. When woken up (and only then), call the wait_clear method to reset the wakeup.
See the fdbuf benchmark for an example of how to receive, send and wait accordingly.
Apache-2.0/MIT