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Introducing DBus-ASIO

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Introducing DBus-ASIO
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How and why we built a new D-Bus library from the ground up
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561
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CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Abstract
Modern software needs inter-process communication. Often through DBus. But the state of the existing libraries are more perfunctory, than active. Consequently, the limits of these libraries become apparent when you go beyond a single thread, are limited to standard libraries, or use anything other than a classical event loop. In this talk we cover the journey, from the realisation of the problem, the guiding development tenets, to the implementation of a library that covers everything from the low-level protocol and high-level C++ interface. We start with a breakdown on the whys and wherefores of the choices made, be it C++11 or C++14, to fork or not to fork existing code, or whether boost::asio should be used. We continue with a discussion on the implementation details, such as the pitfalls in serial protocols, zero-length strings, non-aligned data, and the problems in C++ over C. We end up with production-quality code, the politics of naming, and a question: will this be the final DBus library we need to write? Background: D-Bus is an inter-process mechanism that allows communication between multiple programs running on the same machine. Asio is a cross-platform C++ library for network and low-level I/O programming. This talk covers how and why the former was implemented using the latter.