RPCGEN is an interface generator pre-compiler for Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

 RPC

Remote procedure call

In computer science, a remote procedure call is an inter-process communication that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction...

. It uses an interface definition file to create client and server stubs in C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

.

RPC Language

RPCGEN creates stubs based on information contained within an IDL

Interface description language

An interface description language , or IDL for short, is a specification language used to describe a software component's interface...

 file. This file is written in a language called RPCL - remote procedure call language. This language closely mimics C in style, and is designed purely for defining specification to be used for ONC RPC.

An RPC specification contains a number of definitions. These definitions are used by RPCGEN to create a header file for use by both the client and server, and client and server stubs.

RPCL Definitions

• Constant
• Enumeration
• Struct
• Union (Note that this is not like a C union — it behaves more like a discriminated record)
• Typedef
• Program