Wire compatibility between v5.13 and V6.0

[cvilas]

Will an application written against eCAL version 5.13 be able to communicate with an application written against eCAL version 6.0, either running on the same PC (i.e. comms over shared memory) or a remote PC (comms over UDP)? In other words, even if there is no expectation of API or ABI compatibility, has the payload encoding and transmission mechanisms changed across versions?

[KerstinKeller]

Hi @cvilas,

we tried very hard to maintain wire compatibility between eCAL 5 and 6, and I am not aware of any incompattible changes.
You will have to take care to keep the configuration compatible (e.g. ecal.ini (5.13) vs ecal.yaml (6.0), e.g. they need to use the same registration layer (SHM vs UDP).
It might be possible to configure eCAL 6 in such a way that it's not compatible with eCAL 5.13, but the default configurations should be fine.
We'll make sure to touch upon a few examples in our migration guide, which we will publish before the eCAL 6.0 Release.

However, in general, we do recommend to run the whole system, both local and remote, on the same eCAL version.
We run only basic compliance tests, but not exhaustive ones, so I would consider it "safer" to be on the same version throughout your system.