⚠️ No Changeset found

Latest commit: b2beab7

Merging this PR will not cause a version bump for any packages. If these changes should not result in a new version, you're good to go. If these changes should result in a version bump, you need to add a changeset.

Click here to learn what changesets are, and how to add one.

Click here if you're a maintainer who wants to add a changeset to this PR

All contributors have signed the CLA ✍️ ✅
_{Posted by the CLA Assistant Lite bot.}

I have read the CLA Document and I hereby sign the CLA

Hey any updates on this? @kentonv If this approach is against the vision of this library, I'd be happy to make necessary changes to accomodate the vision. Please let me know.

Hi, sorry, this is in my inbox but it's a pretty busy inbox and I tend to handle the capnweb stuff in batches every couple weeks.

Looking briefly, I wonder if a different design would work with less code needed: Instead of giving the system a WireFormat hook, what if you could declare that your transport wants to send and receive messages in JS object format rather than string format. In this case the system would pass the pre-encoded objects to send() and expect already-decoded objects from receive(). The transport can then do whatever encoding it wants internally.

Actually I could imagine we have multiple levels of encoding:

• string: JSON encoding applied already.
• JSON-ready: JS object, but all contents are JSON-compatible.
• JSON-ready + Uint8Array: JS object except bytes are kept in Uint8Array format, for encoders that support that.
• Structured clone: JS object that is structured clonable. The system only applies encoding to RPC stubs. We could change the MessagePort transport to use this.

That makes a lot of sense, so basically you want this to be handled in the transport layer. Are you comfortable with me adding Generic type support to RPC transport? Something like below

 // Core types in src/serialize.ts:
 export type EncodingLevel = "stringify" | "devalue" | "partial" | "passthrough";
 export type TransportData<L extends EncodingLevel> = L extends "stringify" ? string : object;

 // Generic RpcTransport in src/rpc.ts:
 export interface RpcTransport<L extends EncodingLevel = "stringify"> {
   readonly encodingLevel?: L;
   send(message: TransportData<L>): Promise<void>;
   receive(): Promise<TransportData<L>>;
   abort?(reason: any): void;
 }

Where
stringify -> json
devalue -> plain js object
partial -> Partial devalue + Uint8array
passthrough -> structured clone.

Also do you want me to close this pull request and create a new one for these changes? Or can I force push the new changes directly under the same branch?