Rethinking the D-Bus message bus

David Hermann writes:Later this year, on November 21, 2017, D-Bus will see its 15th birthday. An impressive age, only shy of the KDE and GNOME projects, whose collaboration inspired the creation of this independent IPC system. While still relied upon by the most recent KDE and GNOME releases, D-Bus is not free of criticism. Despite its age and mighty advocates, it never gained traction outside of its origins. On the contrary, it has long been criticized as bloated, over-engineered, and orphaned. Though, when looking into those claims, youire often left with unsubstantiated ranting about the environment D-Bus is used in. If you rather want a glimpse into the deeper issues, the best place to look is the D-Bus bug-tracker, including the assessments of the D-Bus developers themselves. The bugs range from uncontrolled memory usage, over silent dropping of messages, to dead-locks by design, unsolved for up to 7 years. Looking closer, most of them simply cannot be solved without breaking guarantees long given by dbus-daemon(1), the reference implementation. Hence, workarounds have been put in place to keep them under control.Nevertheless, these issues still bugged us! Which is, why we rethought some of the fundamental concepts behind the shared Message Buses defined by the D-Bus Specification. We developed a new architecture that is designed particularly for the use-cases of modern D-Bus, and it allows us to solve several long standing issues with dbus-daemon(1). With this in mind, we set out to implement an alternative D-Bus Message Bus. Half a year later, we hereby announce the dbus-broker project!