Re: RPC & XDR

[nick@nsis.cl.nec.co.jp (Gavin Thomas Nicol) writes:]

>Just, I remembered sun RPC. It includes XDR and rpcgen. I wonder if I
>should continue with what I'm doing, or whether I should just pull XDR
>and rpcgen out of sun RPC.

I would suggest that you stay with a straight binary format, and leave
a hook so you can switch to a more portable, but less efficient means
when necessary. If you really want to be elaborate, have the initial
handshake be a one-byte message which indicates your endianness. If
you agree, then you run with binary format, otherwise you drop back
to a portable representation.

>Note that in general, I feel that program written using rpcgen are
>pretty ugly.

I agree. Also, it would be a pity to spend a lot of time on this now
when, realistically, it'll be all 386-type processors for a while to
come.

                                        Andy
Received on Fri Oct 29 07:55:08 1993