Day 5 Chromium IPC

Day 5 Chromium IPC

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.————Alan Mathison Turing(计算机之父、人工智能之父)

Chromium has a multi-process architecture, which means that we have a lot of processes communicating with each other.
Chromium采用了多进程的架构，这也就意味着，程序中会有很多的跨进程通信。

Our main inter-process communication primitive is the named-pipe.
为了完成进程间通信，我们主要依赖的基本手段是命名管道。

A named-pipe is allocated for each renderer process for communication with the browser process.
每个渲染器进程都会分配到一个命名管道。渲染器进程通过命名管道和浏览器进程进行通信。

The pipes are used in asynchronous mode to ensure that neither end is blocked waiting for the other.
为了确保管道两端在等待对方消息时不受阻，管道被设置成异步模式。

Within the browser, communication with the renderers is done in a separate I/O thread.
浏览器进程中，和渲染器的通信是在一个独立的I/O线程中完成的。

Messages to and from the views then have to be proxied over to the main thread using a ChannelProxy.
传递到视图区或者从视图区传出的消息，都需要用ChannelProxy代理后，交给主线程。

The advantage of this scheme is that resource requests, which are the most common and performance-critical messages, can be handled entirely on the I/O thread and not block the user interface.
这种模式的好处在于，网络资源请求——这种最常见，也是对性能影响最大的消息——可以完全地由I/O线程去处理，而不会影响到用户界面的渲染。

Some messages should be synchronous from the renderer's perspective.
从渲染器的角度来看，有一些消息应该是同步的。

This happens mostly when there is a WebKit call to us that is supposed to return something, but that we must do in the browser.
这种情况经常发生在WebKit发起了一个期待返回值的函数调用，而我们又必须在浏览器中完成这个函数逻辑的时候。

Examples of this type of messages are spell-checking and getting the cookies for JavaScript.
举例来说，“拼写检查”和“为Javascript获取cookie”，都属于这样的情况。

Synchronous browser-to-renderer IPC is disallowed to prevent blocking the user-interface on a potentially flaky renderer.
为了防止本身可能有缺陷的渲染器阻塞住用户界面，从浏览器到渲染器的跨进程同步通信是被禁止的。

本文选自：
https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/inter-process-communication