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Comment by childintime | Hacker News Reader

I find the Fuchsia Interface Description Language (FIDL) interesting as a concept. It allows components written in different languages to easily cooperate:

- Language: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/development/languages/fidl/r...

- Wire-format: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/development/languages/fidl/r...

I think it is an underappreciated concept in today's systems, which suffer an epidemic of monolithism, leading to GB-sized installations that do their own variation of.. nothing much.

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That is just the next step of AIDL and HIDL from Android.

https://developer.android.com/guide/components/aidl

https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/hidl

And it goes back to ideas like DCE and Taligent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent

Also how XPC works on Apple platforms (IDL here are Objective-C protocols).

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ma...

The 'Pink' of the phrase "Pink + Purple == Fuchsia" is a reference to Taligent's Pink, and 'Purple' appears [1] to be a reference to 'Project Purple', the effort at Apple that culminated in the release of the iPhone.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/a-mod...

Fidl is the direct evolution of Mojo

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/mojo...

For some reason Fuchsia has always reminded me of Windows. Or at least what Windows would have been had it been built from a clean slate in 2019.

The handles etc. have clear Windows analogues and Wire is basically COM.

The wire format seems strongly related to protocol buffers, which is to be expected from a Google project.

At Google it's not uncommon to have common code "libraries" actually being separate process exposing a stubby rpc interface (similar to gRPC) over shared memory IPC. It solved several inter-language issues that plagued things like swig and counterintuitively it can also be as fast of even faster than direct cross-language integration.

That's probably not a mistake. NT has some really solid design concepts that POSIX missed on.

> NT has some really solid design concepts that POSIX missed

Such as...? Genuine question. I was impressed a few years ago when I tried Ubuntu for Windows, but maybe that has nothing to do with the NT design.

IO completion ports, for example

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