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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

Interesting approach to bootstrapping a library ecosystem :) I wonder if this works on any nontrivial Python packages.

I have long thought that we need a generic way of expressing foundational library code (datetimes, regex, math, json, http, etc) that could easily be lifted to other nascent languages. At minimum, the unit tests behind battle-tested packages that have encountered all of the edge cases that a green-field design is going to miss.

For many languages isn't that the FFI to C?

Kind of but not really? That requires considerable effort adapting the target for anything written in a language with first-class object support and is woefully unergonomic.

Agreed C isn't an ergonomic one. A better one would need manual memory management, though, to avoid running an additional gc. In contrast to the target languages, it would need at least as much type information.

I haven't worked with Rust, but I wonder if that will move into this space.

Could webassembly provide that? As far as I understand it can be seen as a target callable from any runtime (C, rust, python, the browser...) so a new language could implement wasm and all its libraries could be used?

This is one of the most promising aspects of GraalVM and Sulong[1].

[1]: https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/sulong

There was a time when Parrot was going to be the one ring.

If I understand correctly, OpenVMS made this straightforward—it was easy to call code written in one language from code written in another language.

What we have today:

1) stick to languages which target a common VM,

2) hope your language supports FFI for the library's language, or

3) microservices, in the old-school fashion (piping to/from Unix binaries) or the new-school fashion (HTTPing JSON to/from containerized applications).

Still seems to fail on a trivial one, so I'm guessing that's a "no".

Edit: Got a quick fix from the author and got a result which is not compiling correctly out of the box, but I'd be happy to finish manually. Definitely saves a lot of typing.

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