Is there an attempt to use boost::serialization and Sun's XDR routines to make remote procedure calls with C++ objects? IDL allows only to serialize plain C variables but it might be possible to wrap elegantly low-level XDR calls. Something like that: /// This wraps an XDR pointer into a pseudo-archive. struct xdr_archive { XDR * _xdr_ptr ; xdr_archive( XDR * xp ) : _xrd_ptr(xp) {}; bool_t operator & ( int & i ) { return xdr_int( _xdr_ptr, & i ); }; bool_t operator & ( float & f ) { return xdr_float( _xdr_ptr, & f ); }; ... } The advantage of this is that, if a class has a boost::serialization-compliant 'serialize' method, it becomes easily usable with RPC. For example: /// Sample structure/ struct MyStruct { int _i ; float _f ; template<class Archive > void /serialize( ///Archive & ar, const unsigned int version) { ar & _i; ar & _f; } friend void xdr( XDR * xp, MyStruct * sp ) { s->serialize( xdr_archive( xp ), 0 ); }; }; Although not losing the boolean return value of xdr functions is not straightforward (exceptions or a data member in xdr_archive ?), I would like to know whether it makes sense to use 'serialization' this way. The advantage would be: No need to use an IDL compiler such as rpcgen, less code maintenance, usability of XDR for C++ objects (not just C).