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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

The only bit about SystemD I'm not fully sold on is D-Bus. I love that everything is exposed via D-Bus, but the C API is incredibly difficult to reason about. I've tried writing some higher-level bindings for it and it's still pretty difficult to get right.

Perhaps at some point they'll switch to something that's established instead of maintaining their own IPC protocol.

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D-Bus is the established IPC on desktop Linux. The libdbus library is pretty old and not great, you'll have better luck using one of the other implementations. I can recommend a few:

- GDBus, if you're developing for GNOME

- QtDBus, if you're developing for KDE

- sd_bus, if you're writing low-level C

- zbus, if you're using Rust

For other languages, you'll want to look for bindings to one of those libraries, instead of bindings to libdbus.

I've tried writing higher level bindings on top of libdbus. Once I realised that libdbus was not designed for writing reliable or sane software (there's an error? there's an error! what is it? who knows) I decided to try writing my own implementation of the dbus protocol (the intention was to write C code generators for automating away writing a lot of the boilerplate). Once I had read the specification once I gave up. dbus is the most hideous protocol and most hideous library, its ONLY advantage is its ubiquity.

Yep. Sounds like we went down pretty much exactly the same path. I came to the same conclusion after attempting the same thing.

I disagree with this, in my experience D-Bus is very similar to other IDLs like DCOM, protobuf or ASN.1. If you're familiar with those, D-Bus should actually be easy in comparison.

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