[Xorp-hackers] hello

[J.T. Conklin]

Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com> writes:
>> One of the major limitations of XRL is that it's tied to the XORP code 
>> base, and tied to C++ because of how event callbacks work.
>>   
>> So we are evaluating new ideas, i.e. Facebook Thrift, AMQP, and CORBA.  
>> Component messages are also perhaps not the right IPC mechanism in all 
>> situations, particularly where massive amounts of structured data are 
>> involved -- i.e. a full BGP routing table.
>>   
> Please don't add something that is even more bloated and cumbersome
> than XRL!  It's easy to wrap c code in c++, and that seems to be
> enough code language support to me (I like Java, but no reason to
> write router code in java when the project already supports C++).

One of the reasons I'm interested in investigating other distributed
middleware is because I believe XRL is too bloated and cumbersome.

libxipc, plus the generated XRL interface and target code represent a
significant proportion of the static memory footprint.  This might be
justified if we required something uniquely available in XRL, but it
doesn't seem to offer anything that cannot be found in other off-the-
shelf middleware packages.  And if we can use one of those, less time
needs be spent on maintaining our own.  After all, people don't run
XORP for its innovations in distributed middleware.

Right now Bruce and I have making ourselves familiar with the systems
out there.  We haven't discussed it yet, but I suspect the next steps
will be to make a list of requirements and to do some experimentation
and prototyping.  We will do this openly on the -hackers list, and I
encourage everyone who has a interest to participate in the discussion.

Whatever is ultimately done with XORP's IPC mechanism, the process
will likely enough time that investment in the existing XRL code is
worthwhile.  I have several changes that should result in significant
footprint reductions that I hope to get in as soon as the public repo
reopens.

    --jtc

-- 
J.T. Conklin