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Simple IPC

Highlights

  • Program 2 utilizes Cairo to perform drawing and rendering operations. It is likely that it's already installed on your Linux distribution. If CMake is unable to find Cairo, please install Cairo -dev package:

    Debian/Ubuntu:

    sudo apt-get install libcairo2-dev

    Fedora:

    sudo yum install cairo-devel

    openSUSE:

    zypper install cairo-devel

  • Program 1 and Program 2 communicate with each other using named pipes which are created in the local directory. They use very simple communication protocol: first the length byte is sent after which the message payload follows. Program 1 sends binary requests (messages) to Program 2 which are interpreted and executed. In case of errors, Program 2 responds to Program 1 with human-readable error messages which are written to log.txt file.

  • Messages form a simple class hierarchy which enables Program 2 to utilize the Visitor patter in order to perform related graphical operations. This approach allows to separate the drawing logic from message classes.

Building and running

Run the build.sh script in order to build both programs. Navigate to the build directory and run the program1_exec executable. It can be run with the first argument indicating an input file. A simple input file has been provided: input.txt.

Potential improvements

Due to lack of time, some areas of the code could potentially be improved:

  • Handling of low-level pipe communication should be moved to a class. This would allow to simplify the code in both main() functions. Also, the RAII idiom could be implemented directly without relying on smart pointers (std::unique_ptr) with custom deleters.
  • Input parsing is very simplistic. It's based on the std::strtok function which introduces many limitations. For instance, it doesn't allow to pass a file path containing whitespaces.
  • Message classes contain a decent amount of similar code. This could be fixed by using templates.