Piton

Piton is an experimental IDL (interface definition language). It's designed to be used primarily with zero-copy capable transports, such as a DMA interface on a microcontroller, or io_uring on Linux. Right now it only supports Rust and uses repr(c) as the wire format. Support for more languages and wire formats is coming.

Why

Have you ever wanted to use gRPC over a transport other than HTTP2, and with something lighter weight than protobufs? If so Piton is for you. I've spent a surprisingly large amount of time over the last few years writing small RPC systems over and over again. I wrote one for Bluetooth, one for AWS Nitro Enclave's VSocks, one more for my RTOSes message passing layer, and many more than I can list here. All of these systems were broadly similar, but in the end, tightly coupled to the underlying transport. Worse yet, what if I wanted to switch Bluetooth out for a different protocol, I might have to rewrite the entire framework. Instead, I want a system where I can write code that is independent of the particular transport. Similar to gRPC I even want to be able to use multiple languages. Piton solves this by generating code with pluggable transports.

Usage

Piton's syntax is largely similar to Rust, with the addition of two new types: service and bus. A service implements function call or request-reply semantics. Each method has an argument and a return type. A bus implements a send-only system. You can define a set number of messages the bus accepts. You'll notice that generics are supported throughout Piton.

struct Test<T> {
 foo: u16,
 bar: T,
 boolean: bool,
 array: [u8; 20]
}

struct Foo {
 foo: Test<u32>,
 bar: Bar<u32>
}

enum Bar<T> {
  Test,
  B(T)
}

service Driver<D> {
   method xyz(Bar<D>) -> Test<D>
}

bus TestBus<D> {
  msg foo(Bar<D>)
}

Piton is still a work in progress, check out example to get a feel for how to use it. This documentation section will be fleshed out in the future.