mojo / README.md [blame]

# Mojo

[TOC]

## Getting Started With Mojo

To get started using Mojo in Chromium, the fastest path forward will likely be
to read the Mojo sections of the
[Intro to Mojo & Services](/docs/mojo_and_services.md) guide.

For more detailed reference material on the most commonly used features of Mojo,
head directly to the [bindings](#Bindings-APIs) documentation for your language
of choice or the more general
[mojom Interface Definition Language (IDL)](/mojo/public/tools/bindings/README.md)
documentation.

If you're looking for information on creating and/or connecting to services,
you're in the wrong place! Mojo does not deal with services, it only facilitates
interface definition, message passing, and other lower-level IPC primitives.
Instead, you should take a look at some of the other available
[Mojo & Services](/docs/README.md#Mojo-Services) documentation.

## System Overview

Mojo is a collection of runtime libraries providing a platform-agnostic
abstraction of common IPC primitives, a message IDL format, and a bindings
library with code generation for multiple target languages to facilitate
convenient message passing across arbitrary inter- and intra-process boundaries.

The documentation here is segmented according to the different libraries
comprising Mojo. Mojo is divided into cleanly-separated layers with the basic
hierarchy of subcomponents as follows:

![Mojo Library Layering: Core on bottom, language bindings on top, public system support APIs in the middle](/docs/images/mojo_stack.png)

## Mojo Core
In order to use any of the more interesting high-level support libraries like
the System APIs or Bindings APIs, a process must first initialize Mojo Core.
This is a one-time initialization which remains active for the remainder of the
process's lifetime. There are two ways to initialize Mojo Core: via the Embedder
API, or through a dynamically linked library.

### Embedding
Many processes to be interconnected via Mojo are **embedders**, meaning that
they statically link against the `//mojo/core/embedder` target and initialize
Mojo support within each process by calling `mojo::core::Init()`. See
[**Mojo Core Embedder API**](/mojo/core/embedder/README.md) for more details.

This is a reasonable option when you can guarantee that all interconnected
process binaries are linking against precisely the same revision of Mojo Core.
This includes Chromium itself as well as any developer tools and test
executables built within the tree.

To support other scenarios, use dynamic linking.

## C System API
Once Mojo is initialized within a process, the public
[**C System API**](/mojo/public/c/system/README.md) is usable on any thread for
the remainder of the process's lifetime. This encapsulates Mojo Core's stable
ABI and comprises the total public API surface of the Mojo Core library.

The C System library's only dependency (apart from the system libc and e.g.
pthreads) is Mojo Core itself. As such, it's possible build a fully-featured
multiprocess system using only Mojo Core and its exposed C API. It exposes the
fundamental cross-platform capabilities to create and manipulate Mojo primitives
like **message pipes**, **data pipes**, and **shared buffers**, as well as APIs
to help bootstrap connections among processes.

Despite this, it's rare for applications to use the C API directly. Instead this
API acts as a stable foundation upon which several higher-level and more
ergonomic Mojo libraries are built.

## Platform Support API
Mojo provides a small collection of abstractions around platform-specific IPC
primitives to facilitate bootstrapping Mojo IPC between two processes. See the
[Platform API](/mojo/public/cpp/platform/README.md) documentation for details.

## Higher-Level System APIs
There is a relatively small, higher-level system API for each supported
language, built upon the low-level C API. Like the C API, direct usage of these
system APIs is rare compared to the bindings APIs, but it is sometimes desirable
or necessary.

These APIs provide wrappers around low-level [system API](#C-System-API)
concepts, presenting interfaces that are more idiomatic for the target language:

- [**C++ System API**](/mojo/public/cpp/system/README.md)
- [**JavaScript System API**](/third_party/blink/renderer/core/mojo/README.md)
- [**Java System API**](/mojo/public/java/system/README.md)

## Bindings APIs
The [**mojom Interface Definition Language (IDL)**](/mojo/public/tools/bindings/README.md)
is used to generate interface bindings for various languages to send and receive
mojom interface messages using Mojo message pipes. The generated code is
supported by a language-specific bindings API:

- [**C++ Bindings API**](/mojo/public/cpp/bindings/README.md)
- [**JavaScript Bindings API**](/mojo/public/js/README.md)
- [**Java Bindings API**](/mojo/public/java/bindings/README.md)

Note that the C++ bindings see the broadest usage in Chromium and are thus
naturally the most feature-rich, including support for things like
[associated interfaces](/mojo/public/cpp/bindings/README.md#Associated-Interfaces),
[synchronous calls](/mojo/public/cpp/bindings/README.md#Synchronous-Calls), and
[type-mapping](/mojo/public/cpp/bindings/README.md#Type-Mapping).

## FAQ

### Why not protobuf? Why a new thing?
There are number of potentially decent answers to this question, but the
deal-breaker is that a useful IPC mechanism must support transfer of native
object handles (*e.g.* file descriptors) across process boundaries. Other
non-new IPC things that do support this capability (*e.g.* D-Bus) have their own
substantial deficiencies.

### Are message pipes expensive?
No. As an implementation detail, creating a message pipe is essentially
generating two random numbers and stuffing them into a hash table, along with a
few tiny heap allocations.

### So really, can I create like, thousands of them?
Yes! Nobody will mind. Create millions if you like. (OK but maybe don't.)

### What are the performance characteristics of Mojo?
Compared to the old IPC in Chrome, making a Mojo call is about 1/3 faster and uses
1/3 fewer context switches. The full data is [available here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n7qYjQ5iy8xAkQVMYGqjIy_AXu2_JJtMoAcOOupO_jQ/edit).

### Can I use in-process message pipes?
Yes, and message pipe usage is identical regardless of whether the pipe actually
crosses a process boundary -- in fact the location of the other end of a pipe is
intentionally obscured, in part for the sake of efficiency, and in part to
discourage tight coupling of application logic to such details.

Message pipes which don't cross a process boundary are efficient: sent messages
are never copied, and a write on one end will synchronously modify the message
queue on the other end. When working with generated C++ bindings, for example,
the net result is that a `Remote` on one thread sending a message to a
`Receiver` on another thread (or even the same thread) is effectively a
`PostTask` to the `Binding`'s `TaskRunner` with the added -- but often small --
costs of serialization, deserialization, validation, and some internal routing
logic.

### What about ____?

Please post questions to
[`chromium-mojo@chromium.org`](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/chromium-mojo)!
The list is quite responsive.