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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

This works well because the higher level languages are all implemented in C

Not actually true; there are many high level self-hosted languages, OCaml, Haskell, Forth, Lisp, etc etc. But all these languages generally prioritize having a good C FFI. It is interesting that e.g. Thrift, Protocol Buffers et al don't seem to have made much of an inroad here.

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> It is interesting that e.g. Thrift, Protocol Buffers et al don't seem to have made much of an inroad here.

I'm actually working on a tool called Haris to deal with this very problem. I'm looking to do structured binary data serialization in a way that's efficient, lightweight, and portable (in that it conforms to the C standard). Keep an eye out, I'll probably be posting it on Hacker News within the next few weeks.

Thrift, protobufs don't really work for in-process communication because the cost of serialization can get pretty high - you can easily blow most of your CPU time just serializing protobufs across language boundaries (been there, done that). I think Cap'n Proto may be an interesting approach - the memory layout is the same in all languages, and Kenton is reportedly working on 0-copy IPC - but it remains to be seen how it will turn out.

> It is interesting that e.g. Thrift, Protocol Buffers et al don't seem to have made much of an inroad here.

D-Bus is probably the biggest contender at the moment.

Ocaml's VM is written in C.

Isn't Haskell's runtime written in C? Or maybe it used to be but they changed it.

The runtime is in C-- but has the option of using LLVM for code generation.

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