This small repo purely exists as an example for how we might use ZeroMQ to hop FFI boundaries and not eat a ton of code time, code gen, API surface area on crossing this gap. Given that ZeroMQ is really just a generic message queueing library that has some niceties around a generic socket connection, in the future if we wanted to, it'd be trivial to swap the client library for a "client server" or something similar. How would we do this? We swap the "ipc://" protocol for "tcp://", and it's done.
There's a Rust 'server' that will create and bind to an IPC socket at \\TESTING-IPC.ipc. As of
ZeroMQ v4.3.3 (find the link to the PR in a commit to this repo), the library supports IPC on
Windows given that Windows actually supports AF_UNIX domain sockets just as Linux does.
You can do a cargo r on test-ipc, and perform a dotnet run from within dotnet-app to see
this example working.
There are a few problems with this solution, and it comes down to the maintainership of this
clrzmq4 library. There is an alternative that implements the ZMQ protocol / contract entirely in
C#; however, it doesn't have this IPC support.
Additionally, the version that exists on nuget.org doesn't have the correct version of libzmq either. So, to truly get this to work, I had to compile libzmq myself, then include that in the build for the dotnet-app.
Additionally, I haven't audited the security piece of the ZeroMQ stuff, so how useful it is alongside other security constraints, I do not know.