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0 pointsvertex-four12y ago0 comments

> My impression is that Cap'n Proto is a re-implementation of protocol buffers with additional functionality for RPC wrapped in a futures/promises abstraction.

No. It's a serialisation format that's specifically designed so that data structures in this format can be used as-is by programs, without unnecessarily copying data into or out of the format to use it. The RPC layer is then built on top of that, but the format could also be used for mmapped files, etc.

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bastih12y ago· 1 in thread

I always felt that the RPC should live in an extra project to not distract from the format part.

kentonv12y ago

They are compiled as separate libraries, so you can use the serialization layer without linking in the RPC layer.

But if anything it was the serialization that distracted me from the RPC. Cap'n Proto was originally (briefly) a capability-based RPC system on top of Protobufs. :)

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