IPC evolution thru declarative interface generation

Abstract

Inter-Process Communication (IPC) mechanisms are simple, OS-provided communication endpoints that do not typically accommodate program-level needs on latency, resource utilization, and mobility. But modern network-connected devices, particularly in IoT, have a wide variety of custom needs and frugal capabilities that standard networking stacks and programming interfaces do not cater for well. Thus IPC needs to evolve, but programmers would need to commit to new communication choices through their source code, which is difficult to change. This position paper argues for the reimagining of IPC to benefit IoT through program-level tailoring of composable and reusable protocol building-blocks for computation-and data-management in distributed systems. We propose sprockets, a generalization of RPC beyond marshalling and synchronization. It incorporates programmer annotations about code semantics, program-level network-related functions, and performance expectations. This is a stepping stone towards the declarative synthesis of high-level IPC that better meets the program's communication needs.