Particularly since the best API will use the compiler's symbol tables (avoiding implementing syntactic and semantic analysis twice, buggily), and compiler implementation languages are even more diverse than editor implementation languages.
No. If your language cannot call into a dynamic library using a well-defined C ABI for your platform, then it is already failing to speak a standard protocol. Building all kinds of crazy, complicated, slow infrastructure in order to get it to successfully speak some other protocol, is a symptom of modern-day clueless programming.
> Particularly since the best API will use the compiler's symbol tables (avoiding implementing syntactic and semantic analysis twice, buggily)
Yes, this is of course a good idea. Why one presumes this requires a separate running process, I have no idea.
This also involves a marshalling cost at the ABI boundary, which may be lower overhead than parsing JSON, but is significantly more brittle. And it's less ergonomic for many plugin/editor authors. And it can't be spec'd with a schema that isn't just "read the headers."
Only for some languages, and that cost should be far far less than running a separate process, shipping json over pipes, and parsing the json
> And it's less ergonomic for many plugin/editor authors
I think that many modern programmers find this more ergonomic than a C ABI is part of what he is complaining about. Let's get comfortable with what is good, rather than make what we are comfortable with?
> Let's get comfortable with what is good, rather than make what we are comfortable with?
I agree in the abstract! I just emphatically disagree with characterizing a C ABI as "what is good."
Why is it "significantly more brittle"? It is a well-specified interface. It is less brittle than talking over a socket because the kinds of points of failure involved with sockets don't exist in this case.
> And it can't be spec'd with a schema that isn't just "read the headers."
What does that even mean? It's a protocol just like any protocol, except you get the added benefit that for many languages it can be typechecked. Why are you claiming it can't be specified or that someone has to "read the headers"? What headers?
The fact that we're typing this, and it works -- without the entire world falling apart because of crashes in complex library code -- demonstrates why this is not remotely bonkers.