Since Cap'n Web is a simplification of Cap'n Proto RPC, it would be amazing if eventually the simplification traveled back to all the languages that Cap'n Proto RPC supports (C++, etc.). Or at least could be made to be binary compatible. Regardless, this is great.

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kentonv 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah I now want to go back and redesign the Cap'n Proto RPC protocol to be based on this new design, as it accomplishes all the same features with a lot less complexity!

But it may be tough to justify when we already have working Cap'n Proto implementations speaking the existing protocol, that took a lot of work to build. Yes, the new implementations will be less work than the original, but it's still a lot of work that is essentially running-in-place.

OTOH, it might make it easier for Cap'n Proto RPC to be implemented in more languages, which might be worth it... idk.

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beckford 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Disclaimer: I took over maintenance of the Cap'n Proto C bindings a couple years ago.

That makes sense. There is some opportunity though since the Cap'n Proto RPC had always lacked a JavaScript RPC implementation. For example, I had always been planning on using the Cap'n Proto OCaml implementation (which had full RPC) and using one of the two mature OCaml->JavaScript frameworks to get a JavaScript implementation. Long story short: Not now, but I'd be interested in seeing if Cap'n Web can be ported to OCaml. I suspect other language communities may be interested. Promise chaining is a killer feature and was (previously) difficult to implement. Aside: Promise chaining is quite undersold on your blog post; it is co-equal to capabilities in my estimation.

	▲	josephg 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I tried using the C library recently but was turned off by the lack of bounds checking. I’m not sure how anyone could reasonably accept packets over the wire which allow arbitrary memory access. Am I misunderstanding? Any hope this can be fixed?

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CobrastanJorji 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You mean redesign Cap'n Proto to not have a schema? Or did you mean the API, not the protocol?

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kentonv 4 days ago | parent [-]

Here is the Cap'n Proto RPC protocol:

https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/v2/c%2B%2B/src/c...

That's just the RPC state machine -- the serialization is specified elsewhere, and the state machine is actually schema-agnostic. (Schemas are applied at the edges, when messages are actually received from the app or delivered to it.)

This is the Cap'n Web protocol, including serialization details:

https://github.com/cloudflare/capnweb/blob/main/protocol.md

Now, to be fair, Cap'n Proto has a lot of features that Cap'n Web doesn't have yet. But Cap'n Web's high-level design is actually a lot simpler.

Among other things, I merged the concepts of call-return and promise-resolve. (Which, admittedly, CapTP was doing it that way before I even designed Cap'n Proto. It was a complete mistake on my part to turn them into two separate concepts in Cap'n Proto, but it seemed to make sense at the time.)

What I'd like to do is go back and revise the Cap'n Proto protocol to use a similar design under the hood. This would make no visible difference to applications (they'd still use schemas), but the state machine would be much simpler, and easier to port to more languages.

	▲	izzylan 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I was trying to port Cap'n Proto to modern C# as a side project when I was unemployed, since the current implementation years old and new C# features have been released that would make it much nicer to use. I love the no-copy serialization and object capabilities, but wow, the RPC protocol is incredibly complex, it took me a while to wrap my head around it, and I often had to refer to the C++ implementation to really get it.