fRPC is, at its core, a code generator - one which uses the Frisbee messaging framework as its underlying transport mechanism. It hooks into the protoc compiler and generates an RPC framework that matches the proto3 spec provided to it. Frisbee was designed to allow developers to define their own messaging protocols, while having a library that would handle all the lower level implementation for them. are implementations of the Request/Reply pattern, and so fRPC generates the necessary Frisbee code to handle that messaging pattern. There are three main components to fRPC:
  • The Message Types
  • The Client
  • The Server

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Message Types

One of the challenges with any messaging system is that the messages must be serialized and deserialized into formats that can be transmitted over the wire. With a code generator like fRPC, that means we need to take your proto3 message definitions and generate the accompanying structs in Go. We then need to create consistent, performant, and safe serialization and deserialization functions for those structs. To do this, fRPC makes use of the Polyglot library, which is a high-performance serialization framework that recycles byte buffers and can serialize and deserialize data with almost no allocations. This makes serialization and deserialization extremely fast, while also allowing us to minimize the accompanying memory allocations. polyglot-go library type comes with a number of encode and decode methods for various types, that fRPC chains together to create the serialization and deserialization functions for your proto3 message definitions. We’re also actively working on a polyglot-rs library, which is a Rust implementation of Polyglot, as well as polyglot-ts which is a TypeScript (and Javascript) implementation of Polyglot.

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The Client

The fRPC Client is a simple wrapper around the frisbee.Client type, and contains generated helper functions for creating and sending requests to an fRPC Server and then returning the accompanying response. It’s also possible to deviate from those helper functions and access the underlying frisbee.Client directly. This allows you to do things like turn Frisbee off (and thus retrieve the underlying TCP connection).

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The Server

The fRPC Server is a simple wrapper around the frisbee.Server type, and contains generated helper functions for handling incoming requests and returning the accompanying response based on the handlers you’ve passed in to the constructor. Similar to the Client, it’s also possible to deviate from those helper functions and access the underlying frisbee.Server directly. This allows you to do things like turn Frisbee off (and thus retrieve the underlying TCP connection), or write your own middleware functions for incoming or outgoing packets.

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Accessing Frisbee Directly

As we’ve mentioned before, it’s possible to access the underlying Frisbee primitives from both the client and the server. This is why fRPC is more flexible than other RPC frameworks, and why it’s possible to do things like send a few RPC requests using fRPC and then reuse that underlying TCP connection for something like an HTTP proxy. fRPC generates a frisbee.HandlerTable that allows Frisbee to route incoming packets to the correct handler functions. It’s possible to override this table using the frisbee.Server.SetHandlerTable() method (which is exposed in the generated frpc.Server type). To learn more about how Frisbee works and how you can leverage it from within the generated fRPC code, check out the frisbee-go Github Repository.