Hey,
I'm designing an RPC server for simulators that can run several different long-running commands, and I have a few design questions.
My current design is as follows.
Upon loading files to simulate, the simulator returns a list of unions of interfaces, representing all the simulation commands it supports.
Upon calling one of the commands, a reader interface is returned that allows streaming simulation results.
This currently happens in-thread, so reading big chunks will block the entire server.
So first question is, is there a nicer way to represent a thing that can implement a subset of functions? I could just define a mega interface and not implement methods, but then the issue is how to discover which methods the server implements. Or maybe the correct approach is to use multiple inheritance from the smaller interfaces to concrete implementations?
The next question is how to offload the simulation to a thread? I assumed this would be a very common task but I can't find much in the docs. I found KJ::Thread or something like that, but it's not clear to me how to tie that into the event loop promise API.
Final issue I'm thinking about, for *very* long running simulations, the client disconnecting in the middle of simulation that takes days or weeks becomes a real concern. This is basically level 2 of
https://capnproto.org/rpc.html#protocol-features but as far as I understand C++ is only level 1. What would be a good way to go about things here? If level 2 is just around the corner, I can just ignore the issue for a while, but maybe I need to manually store simulator references outside the connection and hand out tokens to it?
Regards,
Pepijn