The Challenge of Cross-Language Interoperability

CowboyRobot writes "David Chisnall of the University of Cambridge describes how interfacing between languages is increasingly important. You can no longer expect a nontrivial application to be written in a single language. High-level languages typically call code written in lower-level languages as part of their standard libraries (for example, GUI rendering), but adding calls can be difficult. In particular, interfaces between two languages that are not C are often difficult to construct. Even relatively simple examples, such as bridging between C++ and Java, are not typically handled automatically and require a C interface. The problem of interfacing between languages is going to become increasingly important to compiler writers over the coming years."

Comments

Cross language - what .Net gets right

[cstec]

I don't even like .Net, but they won this round years ago.

Re:Cross language - what .Net gets right

[Dahamma]

.NET is already an extremely verbose platform that is many years ahead of its competition

Wha? Its "competition" for what, exactly? Windows apps? So, wait, you are telling me a Microsoft development platform is ahead of its competition for developing Windows apps? And how is that interesting?

Re:Cross language - what .Net gets right

[TheRaven64]

I talk a bit about .NET in TFA. It does some things right, but it still struggles with things like mutability. If you use F#, you get a language that is a lot like OCaml, and if you use it like OCaml, then it's fine. When you start trying to integrate with C#, then you find that they have different concepts of mutability. And you have to do it because the F# collection classes are much slower than their C# counterparts because the CLR lacks most of the optimisations that a typical OCaml implementation has to elide copies of immutable structures when your operation is implicitly destructive.

Re:Java, all you need.

[Dahamma]

Clearly there is some sarcasm/irony, as "What do you need multiple languages for anyway?", "and this awesome applet I saw on someone's homepage once" is pretty clear (unless he's a moron).

But honestly the 80% of the rest of his points are actually true about Java - so either he doesn't really understand irony, he doesn't really understand Java, or he is just trying (rather successfully, IMO) to troll slashdot. I'm hoping that last case, in which I salute his efforts :)

Sockets

[jhol13]

Use sockets. In majority of cases the performance is more than good enough, especially if designed properly, and you get network transparency "for free".
Sure there are cases where sockets are not appropriate, but IMHO they are far too seldom used.