Show HN: Iceoryx2 – Fast IPC Library for Rust, C++, and C

Today we released iceoryx2 v0.4!

iceoryx2 is a service-based inter-process communication (IPC) library designed to make communication between processes as fast as possible - like Unix domain sockets or message queues, but orders of magnitude faster and easier to use. It also comes with advanced features such as circular buffers, history, event notifications, publish-subscribe messaging, and a decentralized architecture with no need for a broker.

For example, if you're working in robotics and need to process frames from a camera across multiple processes, iceoryx2 makes it simple to set that up. Need to retain only the latest three camera images? No problem - circular buffers prevent your memory from overflowing, even if a process is lagging. The history feature ensures you get the last three images immediately after connecting to the camera service, as long as they’re still available.

Another great use case is for GUI applications, such as window managers or editors. If you want to support plugins in multiple languages, iceoryx2 allows you to connect processes - perhaps to remotely control your editor or window manager. Best of all, thanks to zero-copy communication, you can transfer gigabytes of data with incredibly low latency.

Speaking of latency, on some systems, we've achieved latency below 100ns when sending data between processes - and we haven't even begun serious performance optimizations yet. So, there’s still room for improvement! If you’re in high-frequency trading or any other use case where ultra-low latency matters, iceoryx2 might be just what you need.

If you’re curious to learn more about the new features and what’s coming next, check out the full iceoryx2 v0.4 release announcement.

Elfenpiff

Links:

* GitHub: https://github.com/eclipse-iceoryx/iceoryx2 * iceoryx2 v0.4 release announcement: https://ekxide.io/blog/iceoryx2-0-4-release/ * crates.io: https://crates.io/crates/iceoryx2 * docs.rs: https://docs.rs/iceoryx2/0.4.0/iceoryx2/

Show HN: Iceoryx2 – Fast IPC Library for Rust, C++, and C
ekxide.io

What's the difference between iceoryx and iceoryx2? I don't want to use Rust and want to stick to C++ if possible.

Suggestion: would be cool to have a quick description of the system calls involved for each supported platform [2]. I'm guessing mmap on linux/osx and CreateFileMapping on Windows?

--

1: https://github.com/LiveAsynchronousVisualizedArchitecture/si...

2: https://github.com/eclipse-iceoryx/iceoryx2?tab=readme-ov-fi...

> want to stick to C++ if possible

The answer to that concern is in the title of the submission.

Shared memory is crazy fast, and I'm surprised that there aren't more things that take advantage of it. Super odd that gRPC doesn't do shared memory, and basically never plans to?[1].

All that said, the constructive criticism I can offer for this post is that in mass-consumption announcements like this one for your project, you should:

- RPC throughput (with the usual caveats/disclaimers) - Comparison (ideally graphed) to an alternative approach (ex. domain sockets) - Your best/most concise & expressive usage snippet

100ns is great to know, but I would really like to know how much RPC/s this translates to without doing the math, or seeing it with realistic de-serialization on the other end.

[0]: https://3tilley.github.io/posts/simple-ipc-ping-pong/

[1]: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/19959