A Foreign Call Through the TIOBE Top 20 and some

The "and some" being due to TIOBE Top 20 being a shitty index and lacked some of the most interesting languages.

The call starts in Java and proceeds through the chain (with highlights such as PL/PGSQL, VisualBasic and bash) and ends up in a kernel module providing the much needed "leftpad" functionality.

This will probably be almost impossible to reproduce as I did some pretty dirty hacks to make this even work, but I warmly invite you to try. I did all of this on a sort-of up-to-date debian stable with mono, jxcore, postgres and go built from source. I can send you a copy of the ~10GB debian VM image I used to develop this, just /query me on freenode.

--jaseg

Complete list of languages involved

1. Java (JNI out)
2. C
3. C++
4. Java (JNI in, JNA out)
5. C#

• Due to two separate segfaulty bugs this needs a very recent version of Mono, and needs to be run with sgen, not boem.

1. Python
2. Visual Basic

• vbnc is kind of unstabley, but generally works fine.

1. Javascript

• That think needs to be compiled from source to work

1. Perl
2. Ruby

• Not mruby as I couldn't get mruby to work

1. Delphi

• Does something that fucks with the jvm enough to make it crash on exit. Thus, we exit a bit harder than normal and everything works again.

1. Assembly
2. Objective C
3. Objective C++

• Oh god these toolchains

1. R

• Requires ulimiting the maximum stack size to something like 256MB to work

1. Groovy

• On first run downloads a bunch of shit from the internet and executes it in the background.

1. Matlab/Octave
2. PL/pgSQL

• Requires that strange borked postgres build done by the Makefile.

1. Fortran 90

• Actually quite a neat language!

1. bash

• Uses ctypes.sh

1. TCL
2. Lua
3. Rust
4. Go
5. Haskell

• Requires a metric fuckton of libraries spread everywhere, but when invoked with those, works.

1. Linux kernel module via chardev