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From: andrew@ads.arpa (Andrew Neuschatz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: remote procedure calls
Message-ID: <857@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 17-Nov-86 16:45:53 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.857
Posted: Mon Nov 17 16:45:53 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 17-Nov-86 22:05:59 EST
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
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I'm trying to figure out a way to do remote procedure calls in C.  It seems to
me that a process could send a call to another process with identical code via
standard pipe, by passing over a pointer to the procedure and any necessary
arguments.  Since C compilers don't check number or type of parameters, you
could probably make a general-use procedure "remote_call" called with

	remote_call(pipe,funcname,arg1,arg2 .. )

In the other process would be something that gets the function pointer and
arguments out of the pipe and calls

	funcname(arg1,arg2..)

(Obviously sending pointers to variables and getting values returned are two
potential cans of worms, but let's skip them for now.)  This looks like it
takes a lot of C smarts; also I just assume not reinvent something that may
already exist.  Does anybody know of a set of functions that do something like
this?  Please respond directly to me rather than the info-c board.

Thanks

Andrew Neuschatz
Advanced Decision Systems
andrew@ads.ARPA