Hacker News Reader

Comment by 41b696ef1113 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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.

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).

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com