Adding Named Pipes feasibilty.

[valerij zaporogeci]

Hello, someone wants to use Named Pipes, but still insists on relying on gRPC in doing so (shrugs), so I need your help, as the knowledgeable ones, in clarifying on how feasible it is to make gRPC use Named Pipes instead of network or domain sockets. I am a C guy, so this C++ stuff looks scary for me. I can't get what I need to change. ports are going down to the deepest guts of grpc, from the very start you set ports and then it goes down to the grpc core, where still ports are everywhere.

I am not asking to make a research for me, just an evaluation, since you understand grpc internals and it might be easy to you to answer if changing transport from a network based one to something else is feasible or it would be too hard, since grpc is not flexible with this respect and a bit of direction of where the change should primarily happen - on the surface (API) is enough (doubtfully), grpc core. where? should it be rewritten or it's more an addition? also, I would want to make it in a compatible way, so that code wouldn't stop working with the next gRPC update.

thank you in advance.

[Manikandan V S]

We were also exploring the same and found this https://github.com/cyanfish/grpc-dotnet-namedpipes . We are yet to completely analyze it for our usage. 

Its dotNet based one but you can still look at the underlying grpc implementation on how its done.

If you find any other solution, Let me know.

Regards,

Mani.

[valerij zaporogeci]

thank you, I am aware of that project. there is a mention from the author, that his implementation uses custom wiring protocol and thus is incompatible with other gRPC. the requirement to me is to be interoprable with C++ client/server and C# client/server soultions. So, I am not sure what is easier - reimplementing what Cyanfish has done in C# to C++ or changing/adding directly to gRPC (core).

понеділок, 20 лютого 2023 р. о 07:35:11 UTC+2 Manikandan V S пише:

[AJ Heller]

If you're asking about Named Pipes on Windows, there is no support at the moment. On posix systems, if you have a raw file descriptor for a named pipe, I believe you can create a channel from it using `CreateCustomInsecureChannelFromFd`: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/420180c6d7a5ad00870f099d2e2c79ad367fe9ee/include/grpcpp/create_channel_posix.h#L40-L47. Caveat: I have not tried this myself.

There is a long-standing open issue to design, scope, and add support for named pipes on Windows: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/13447. The gRPC team will not have bandwidth to do this in the forseeable future, unfortunately.