This is an idea for the architecture of a Ricochet client. Don't get excited. It doesn't do anything.

The idea is to implement all client backend logic in Go, and export a RPC API for frontends.

Benefits:

• We can have all network-facing and critical logic in Go, without being forced to use Go for frontends (because it lacks decent UI capability)
• We can keep the current Qt UI implementation as one frontend
• It's easy to build new frontends in anything that can use gRPC (like cli)
• Backends are headless and frontends are detachable and interchangable
• Can do some fancy sandboxing

Other ideas:

• This is currently using RPC only for the backend<->frontend; would it make sense to RPC any other layers or distinct components? Could have security benefits.
• In particular, we still have one process that has access to private keys, tor config, and untrusted network traffic. That sucks.
• Can do frontend connection to backend over authorized onion for advanced setups

Structure:

• core is the client logic implementation
• rpc has gRPC/protobuf definitions & generated code
• backend is the backend RPC server
• cli is an example frontend client