dh1tw / icd

Shackbus Interface Control Definition

Shackbus Message Interface Control Documents

This repository contains the official message definitions for all Shackbus messages. The messages are defined in the Protocol Buffers version 3) Interface Definition Language (IDL).

Protocol Buffer provides a variety of code generators which will create the code stubs in your favorite language. Currently Protocol Buffers supports:

• C++
• C#
• Go
• Java
• Python
• PHP
• Ruby
• Objective C
• Javascript

There are many third party plugins available for other programming languages.

For pure ANSI C code generation check out:

• nanopb for embedded devices
• protobuf-c

License

This library is published under the the permissive MIT license. Allowing private and commercial usage. You can find a good comparison of Open Source Software licenses, including the MIT license at choosealicense.com

How to use this repository

Typically, you would include this repository as a git submodule in your project.

    $ git submodule add https://github.com/shackbus/icd.git

How to generate code

It is always a good idea to seperate generated code from the source files. Assuming you have included this repository as a git submodule, you would probably have a directory structure similar to this one:

    your_project _
                 |- icd //this repository
                 |- icd_gen //where the generated files will be located
                 |- build
                 |- src
                 |- include
                 |- ...

Make sure you are in the root directory of your project. The protocol buffers code generator. The example below will generate C++ bindings for all Shackbus messages.

    $ protoc --proto_path=./icd --cpp_out=./icd_gen ./icd/*.proto

In this case, the protoc generated in the ./icd_gen directory, two files for each proto file. For example for error.proto:

    error.pb.h // headers
    error.pb.c // code implementation

You can now include the generated files in your code. In C++ for example:

    #include "error.pb.h"

The amount of output files and the import depends of course on the specific language you are using. For more information about the specifics of your programming language, check the official protocol buffers documentation.