So the official XML-RPC standard doesn't support 64-bit values. But in these modern times, 64-bit values are increasingly common.
How do you handle these? What XML-RPC extensions are the most common? What language bindings are there? I'm especially interested in Python and C++, but all information is appreciated.
I don't know anything about how XMLRPC could be extended but I did find this mail about the subject:
In XML-RPC, everything is transmitted as a string, so I don't think that choice is really that bad - except of course for the additional clumsiness for invoking explicit conversion functions.
But no, XML-RPC doesn't have a data type that can represent integers above 2**32. If you can accept losing precision, you can use doubles (but you still would have to convert explicitly on the sender).
Some libraries support 64 bits extensions, indeed, but there doesn't seem to be a standard. xmlrpc-c, for example, has a so called i8 but it doesn't work with python (at least not by default).
I would recommend to either:
The use of "i8" as a data-type is becoming more and more common. I recently added this to my Perl XML-RPC module (http://search.cpan.org/dist/RPC-XML) in response to a request from a large group that needed it in order to work with a server written in Java. I don't know what toolkit the server used, but it was already accepting i8 as a type.
One thing that I feel still has to be addressed, is whether the "int" alias for "i4" should also accept i8, the way it currently does i4. Or, for that matter, if a parameter typed as i8 should quietly accept an input typed as i4. XML-RPC has great potential as a lightweight, low-overhead protocol handy when you don't need all the coverage of SOAP, but it is often overlooked in the religious wars between REST and SOAP.
XML-RPC is in need of some updating and revision, if we could just get the original author to permit it...