Will IceRPC support other languages? I've only found the C# version.

[qianqians]

Desired feature

I plan to develop a game server based on C++, and I want to implement network communication with IceRPC, but I've only found the C# version.

[bernardnormier]

Absolutely!

While IceRPC currently supports only C#, we definitely plan to add support for more languages. It's taking a while because we spent a lot of time updating Ice. We brought into Ice various improvements first implemented in IceRPC C#. See https://github.com/orgs/zeroc-ice/discussions/4782 and https://docs.zeroc.com/ice/3.8/cpp/ice-3-8-0.

You can view IceRPC for C# as a blueprint for future IceRPC implementations. The terminology and features (like invocation and dispatch pipelines) will be the same or at least similar.

Right now, we're improving this C# blueprint with two important updates:

• make QUIC the default transport (already implemented on main)
• refactor the Slice compiler toolchain, with a code-generator written in C# (work in progress)

The better the blueprint, the easier it will be to use it as the starting point for other IceRPC implementations.

Since you're using C++, you should have a look at Ice 3.8 for C++ for your game server. It provides a modern, C++17-based API, with some support for C++20 features (such as spans).

We have no immediate plan to implement IceRPC in C++. The main difficulty is there is no standard library support for executors and tasks, like in C#, Python, Rust, Swift... Without executors and tasks, we can't provide a nice async API.

C++26 may improve this situation with the std::execution framework but we haven't researched it yet. Better wait until C++26 and C++ compilers actually implement it!