ZeroDDS rc.3: The complete OMG ecosystem in production-grade Rust

[SandraK82]

If you work with DDS in robotics, automotive, or industrial real-time, you know the friction: a C++ toolchain zoo, per-seat license fees, and stacks that are hard to audit or fork. We asked what a DDS
looks like that's built in Rust from the ground up: memory-safe, a single Cargo workspace, Apache-2.0, no vendor lock-in.

That's ZeroDDS. Today 1.0.0-rc.3 is out, and I'll deliberately also write about what it isn't.

Native RTPS 2.5 wire, interop-verified

ZeroDDS speaks RTPS 2.5 natively, the same OMG-standard protocol as Cyclone DDS, RTI Connext, Fast DDS, and OpenDDS. We don't assert interoperability, we verify it: live against all four stacks (the
OMG Shapes Demo as the reference scenario) and byte-exact against recorded XCDR2 fixtures in CI. 100+ crates, more than 11,000 tests across the workspace.

Breadth, not just DCPS

Beyond DDS-DCPS 1.4 we've implemented XTypes 1.3, DDS-Security 1.2, DDS-RPC, DDS-XML, and DDS-XRCE, plus bridges to MQTT, AMQP, CoAP, gRPC, WebSocket, and ROS 2, and seven language bindings: C, C++,
C#, Java, Python, TypeScript, and Rust. Every spec claim is backed by a section-by-section audit ledger (the public spec-coverage matrix), and every performance number is reproducible with the public
benchmark harness via cargo bench, full HdrHistogram output.

ROS 2: we didn't guess where it hurts, we catalogued it

Before we put "ROS 2 support" on a slide, we collected 349 real-world ROS↔DDS pain reports from the community (discovery storms, silent QoS mismatches, WiFi, large data, scaling, config hell) and
engineered specifically against them:

• Silent QoS mismatches. The classic where two endpoints just never find each other and nothing is logged. We fixed the keyed/no-key entity-id bug (ROS bidirectional 20/20 against rmw_cyclonedds)
  and built a diagnostic CLI: zerodds-ros2-shim doctor flags the most common WiFi misconfig (multicast-free with no unicast peers) as a hard error, discovery-independent.
• WiFi discovery. A single SPDP beacon gets lost in 802.11 power-save when the robot is asleep during the RX window, leaving participants=0. Fix: an initial-announcement burst (10×200 ms until
  matched), proven on a real WiFi rig.
• Large fleets and WAN. A multi_robot() profile: unicast-only discovery, no multicast storm.
• Secure by default. SROS2 enclaves are loaded directly, with no silent downgrade on a broken config.
• Debugging. ros2 topic info -v with real GUID to node resolution (new in rc.3).

Out of the box via rmw_zerodds, rclpy and rclcpp.

And if your stack isn't DDS at all: ZeroDDS is also a complete CORBA 3.3 ORB

Sounds like two worlds, but it's one codebase: the same Rust implementation speaks GIOP/IIOP alongside RTPS. For anyone with a CORBA estate in finance, telco, or defense whose ORB vendor is dying, this
is the real lever. Not a theoretical migration plan, but a drop-in test: throw your legacy system at ZeroDDS without rewriting a line.

Complete means complete: GIOP 1.0 to 1.2, POA, CSIv2/GSSUP security, valuetypes (including chunked wire with nested children), AMI/AMH (async client and server), Bidirectional GIOP, Portable
Interceptors, Interface Repository, RT-CORBA, plus the Object Transaction Service (two-phase commit) and CosTrading.

And it's cross-ORB wire-validated against real foreign ORBs: valuetypes byte-exact against JacORB 3.9 (bidirectional), GSSUP and OTS wire byte-exact against JacORB, the Bidirectional service context
against omniORB. It goes down to a live handshake where JacORB calls back into a ZeroDDS callback over the same connection, and a JacORB OTS Current.begin() propagates its transaction context to a
ZeroDDS server.

New in rc.3

• Zero-copy shared memory on Windows. The SHM transport (POSIX shm_open/mmap on Linux and macOS) now runs on Windows too via CreateFileMapping, with correct owner-create race serialization
  via LockFileEx. Tested on a real Windows runner, not just "it compiles."
• ROS 2 endpoint info. ros2 topic info -v resolves endpoint GUIDs to node names.
• Continuous cleanup across the language codegen and docs.

What's next, heading toward rc.4

A toolbox that becomes an operator story. The pieces already ship: idlc, dds-lint, a monitor with Prometheus and OTLP, deterministic record-and-replay (.zddsrec), wire inspection (spy,
snitch, pcap), a conformance harness, a chaos injector, and a routing service. rc.4's job is to turn that pile into a mapped, task-oriented toolbox: a "which tool for which job" matrix,
tool-to-subsystem cross-linking, and real recipes instead of flag references. The capability is there; the operability story is what we're finishing.

ROS 2 across distros, gated in CI. The rmw_zerodds surface is code-complete (pub/sub, services, wait-sets, loaning, REP-2009, nothing left UNSUPPORTED). rc.4 adds a continuous live ros2 smoke
as a green CI gate across Humble, Iron, and Jazzy, so multi-distro interop is verified on every commit, not by hand.

Embedded, on the horizon. Honest about its stage: a no_std safe subset (foundation, CDR, the XRCE client) already builds for Cortex-M (thumbv7em-none-eabihf) on every commit, and DDS-XRCE 1.0,
the OMG's micro-DDS for constrained devices, ships today with client and agent. The direction is a fuller DCPS micro-edition so the same Rust types and wire run from a workstation down to an MCU. It's
a direction, not a dated milestone, and we'll say so until it's real.

And honestly, what it isn't

It's a release candidate, not 20 years production-hardened. On performance, across real workloads we're on par with the established stacks: not uniformly ahead, and the RT-tuned commercial pro
configurations are a different league we don't claim to beat. An OMG Vendor-ID has been filed but not yet assigned. We are not safety-certified (ISO 26262, IEC 62304, DO-178C).

If you're evaluating DDS in Rust, need multi-vendor interop, have to migrate a dying CORBA landscape, or just want an auditable, license-free stack: try rc.3 and tell us where it breaks.

Get started

• Rust: cargo add zerodds-dcps
• Codegen for any of the seven languages: zerodds-idlc
• ROS 2: build the rmw shim and run with RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_zerodds_cpp
• Spec-coverage matrix and reproducible benchmarks: https://zerodds.de

Links: https://zerodds.de · https://github.com/zero-objects/zero-dds