Metacall

Many winters while ago I needed to find a simple cross-platform IPC library to use for one of my projects. After a good amount of searching, I was disappointed to discover that although there were lots of libraries for handling IPC, all were very “enterprisey”, had a lot of dependencies, and were generally difficult to integrate into my simple console application. Basically, I wanted to use something that was easier than raw sockets/pipes, but conceptually simpler than a gigantic platform-specific monster like WCF. Before long, I came to the realization that there was nothing left to do but write to this library for myself. I called it “Metacall” to reflect the use of C++ template metaprogramming in its implementation, combined with the notion of “calling” functions over the TCP/IP sockets.

Metacall was designed with the following principles in mind:

• Do be cross-platform compatible between Linux and Windows.
• Don’t depend on anything outside of CRT, STL and sockets.
• Do prefer simplicity over a complex feature set.
• Do keep boilerplate code requirements to a minimum.