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Comment by xyc | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the pointers! Will do. I've fired up https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/inspector and the code looks helpful too.

I'm looking at integrating MCP with desktop app. The spec (https://spec.modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/basic/tra...) mentions "Clients SHOULD support stdio whenever possible.". The server examples seem to be mostly stdio as well. In the context of a sandboxed desktop app, it's often not practical to launch a server as subprocess because:

- sandbox restrictions of executing binaries

- needing to bundle binary leads to a larger installation size

Would it be reasonable to relax this restriction and provide both SSE/stdio for the default server examples?

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Having broader support for SSE in the servers repository would be great. Maybe I can encourage you to open a PR or at least an issue.

I can totally see your concern about sandboxed app, particularly for flatpack or similar distribution methods. I see you already opened a discussion https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/specification/discus..., so let's follow up there. I really appreciate the input.

A possible cheap win for servers would be to support the systemd "here's an fd number you get exec'ed with" model - that way server code that's only written to do read/write on a normal fd should be trivial to wire up to unix sockets, TCP sockets, etc.

(and then having a smol node/bun/go/whatever app that can sit in front of any server that handles stdio - or a listening socket for a server that can handle multiple clients - and translates the protocol over to SSE or websockets or [pick thing you want here] lets you support all such servers with a single binary to install)

Not that there aren't advantages to having such things baked into the server proper, but making 'writing a new connector that works at all' as simple as possible while still having access to multiple approaches to talk to it seems like something worthy of consideration.

[possibly I should've put this into the discussion, but I have to head out in a minute or two; anybody who's reading this and engaging over there should feel free to copy+paste anything I've said they think is relevant]

^ asked the question in the discussion: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/specification/discus...

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