Cross-language development.

I started looking at Erlang about a year ago and would have used it if it wasn’t so difficult to develop cross-language solutions. I wanted to be able to use the guts of Erlang for concurrency, but re-use existing algorithms written in Java and C# within each Erlang process. It looks like Facebook engineers may have done just that with Thrift, a cross-language serialization and RPC framework.

One of the downsides of multi-language development is reusing code across languages. Facebook created Thrift to tie together the Babeling Tower of all their different implementation languages. Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C , Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Another approach might be to cross language barriers using REST based services.

This is very cool! I love the idea of being able to marry the strengths of multiple languages. I’ll be taking a closer look at this over the coming months.