cross-lang-and-cross-platform / cross-lang-and-cross-platform

Making cross-language interoperability and cross-platform development easier

What are were we trying to build?

Note: all the text below was written before the boom of LLM like GPT-4. The project is stopped due to uncertainty. LLMs like GPT-4 show promise for automation of rewriting the code at the speed that hasn't been seen before. Consequently, the value of the project dropped unexpectedly.

We're trying to create tooling that would allow easy generation of bindings from code in programming languages whose compilers allow emitting LLVM: (1) Rust, (2) ActionScript, (3) Ada, (4) C#, (5) Common Lisp, (6) PicoLisp, (7) Crystal, (8) CUDA, (9) D, (10) Delphi, (11) Dylan, (12) Forth, (13) Fortran, (14) Free Basic, (15) Free Pascal, (16) Graphical G, (17) Halide, (18) Haskell, (19) Java bytecode, (20) Julia, (21) Kotlin, (22) Lua, (23) Objective-C, (24) OpenCL, (25) PostreSQL and PLpgSQL, (26) Ruby, (27) Scala, (28) Swift, (29) XC, (30) Xojo, and (31) Zig, (32) Python.¹

Notes

• The desired properties for the tooling will stem from the intended applications, known challenges, and shortcomings in similar tools and libraries.
• The choice of LLVM as the mainstay of the toolings will be justified based on the desired properties.

Why is such tooling needed?

Such tooling would greatly facilitate cross-language code reuse and cross-platform development.

This in turn would result in many person-hours saved on reimplementations of the same functionality in different programming languages. In addition, the implementations in programming languages like C, C++, Rust, Fortran, and Ada, - according to "Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages: How Do Energy, Time, and Memory Relate?" - often have lower latency, higher throughput, thinner memory footprint, and reduced energy consumption. All these runtime characteristics often restrict the choice of programming languages, forcing developers to use not the languages

• that would allow to ship more feature-rich products faster;
• that the developers love;

but the languages that would provide reasonable runtime characteristics.

According to Mapped: Energy Consumption Per Capita Around the World, even as small country as Iceland spent 990,097,000 kWh of energy on data centers in 2019. While it's only 5.2% of Iceland's total energy consumption, 65.9% of energy consumption in Iceland was attributed to notoriosly energy-hungry Aluminum smelters whereas less energy-hungry Ferroalloy industry in fact consumed less than data centers: 897,846,000 kWh or 4.7% of total energy consumption. Iceland is in a good position.

Thanks to the country’s abundance of geothermal resources, geothermal and hydropower plants account for more than 99% of Iceland’s electricity generation.

However, renewable supply of energy is limited and even renewable energy is not free.

	Price per kWh
Canada	0.179 USD
Russia	0.090 USD
Iceland	0.139 USD (households) / 0.053 USD (businesses)
China	0.083 USD
Brazil	0.142 USD

The table generated with https://www.tablesgenerator.com/markdown_tables

Billions of dollars are spent worldwide to process data. Such companies as Khan Academy even found it reasonable to rewrite the back-end, which initially was developed in Python, using Golang. As they claimed, the decision was driven by rising bills from cloud service providers. Google invested in the development of Carbon programming language because it wanted safety but interoperability between C++ and Rust is complicated.

With the recent cold fusion breakthrough, the energy crysis in Europe might eventually be resolved. However, it will take many years until the gained knowledge will be put to practice.

Notes

• The to-be-developed tooling will not compete but coexist and possibly even provide foundation for cross-platform UI libraries (such as Flutter and React Native), i.e. the tooling is intended to be a part of the respective software ecosystems.
• Microservices and IPC (inter-process communication) are two other important approaches to cross-language interoperability. They come with considerably greater performance overhead that can be justified in some but not even in the majority of use cases.

Existing approaches and their issues

Good overview of the prior art is given in the presentation "Making Libraries Consumable for Non-C++ Developers - Aaron R Robinson - CppCon 2021". Duration: 58:22.

How is the project going to be driven from the financial standpoint?

The team buys the motto of Rust Foundation,

"Good software is built by happy, well-supported people".

Once the working group delivers the results that bring undeniable value, the team will consider possible options of getting the financial support for the project.

On connection of "Related projects, teams, and individual developers" and "Learning resources"

There will be an inevitable overlap between the two parts of the repository because tools and libraries are developed by people, who create teams, and orgaize projects. However, "Related projects, teams, and individual developers" is meant to be sort of an address book or a telephone directory for potential and actual collaborators, whereas learning resources is supposed to be a place to learn more about cross-language interoperability and cross-platform development.

Repository navigation

• History of the project
• Our tech stack
• Sought-after competencies
• Learning resources
• Related projects, teams, and individual developers
• Ongoing work

Communications

• Discord server of the working group: https://discord.gg/8xUXjshS4m

Footnotes

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM ↩