Dying? Hm, not to my knowledge. In fact, I saw a highly-commented thread on HN just a couple of weeks ago about Cap'n Proto. What gives you the sense that it's on its way out?
Sandstorm Oasis going away and the last time I checked (maybe a year ago?) work seemed to have stopped on getting the protocol implemented in the browser.
Hi, I'm the author of Cap'n Proto, and co-founder of Sandstorm.io. When Sandstorm failed, I went to Cloudflare where I'm leading the Cloudflare Workers project. We're using Cap'n Proto (including RPC) pretty heavily there!
That said, it's true that Cap'n Proto relies on its users to contribute improvements to the implementation. We don't currently have a team who can dedicate their time to building out capnp implementations in every language.
At present, within Cloudflare, the heaviest use is C++, with some stuff in Go, Rust, Java, and Lua. Hence, if you look at the C++ implementation you'll see it's been pretty active. At the moment we don't have a JavaScript use case so haven't put effort into that implementation. But given that Workers itself is a JavaScript platform, it seems reasonably likely that we'll end up putting some work into the JavaScript/TypeScript implementation at some point down the road.
Glad to hear it! It really would be a shame for such a great protocol to go unused.
That's interesting that you feel Sandstorm failed. I draw inspiration from it on a regular basis for several of my projects. Maybe it was just ahead of its time.
Sandstorm the company definitely failed (ran out of money and couldn't raise more, while having negligible actual revenue). Sandstorm the open source project continues and has actually seen an uptick in development activity lately.