65c360a2ca
Using internals of MRI by using RARRAY_PTR makes it necessary for other implementations such as Rubinius to continuously copy the structure returned by RARRAY_PTR back and forth since in Rubinius objects are layed out differently internally. Extensions should not depend and use these internal MRI structures if this is not necessary and when there are API methods that can provide the same functionality. This makes sure other implementations can also use the extension without any big problems. For this reason I also removed the FIXME comment, since that change would also heavily depend on the internal memory layout of objects on MRI.
MessagePack
Extremely efficient object serialization library. It's like JSON, but very fast and small.
What's MessagePack?
MessagePack is a binary-based efficient object serialization library. It enables to exchange structured objects between many languages like JSON. But unlike JSON, it is very fast and small.
Typical small integer (like flags or error code) is saved only in 1 byte, and typical short string only needs 1 byte except the length of the string itself. [1,2,3] (3 elements array) is serialized in 4 bytes using MessagePack as follows:
require 'msgpack'
msg = [1,2,3].to_msgpack #=> "\x93\x01\x02\x03"
MessagePack.unpack(msg) #=> [1,2,3]
MessagePack-RPC is cross-language RPC library for client, server and cluster applications. Because it releases you from complicated network programming completely and provides well-designed API, you can easily implement advanced network applications with MessagePack-RPC.
require 'msgpack/rpc'
class MyHandler
def add(x,y) return x+y end
end
svr = MessagePack::RPC::Server.new
svr.listen('0.0.0.0', 18800, MyHandler.new)
svr.run
require 'msgpack/rpc'
c = MessagePack::RPC::Client.new('127.0.0.1',18800)
result = c.call(:add, 1, 2) #=> 3
Getting Started
Usage and other documents about implementations in each language are found at the web site.