Plasmite – a lightweight IPC system that's fun
At Oblong Industries one of the basic building blocks of everything we built was a homegrown C-based IPC system called Plasma. The message channel was an mmap'd file used as a ring buffer. All messages were human-readable, performance was good, configuration was trivial. What was especially useful (and unusual in IPC systems it seems) was the property that message channels outlive all readers and writers, and even survive reboots, because they're just files. For local IPC you don't need a broker or server process. All the engineers who ever worked at Oblong loved Plasma, so I've recreated…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
At Oblong Industries one of the basic building blocks of everything we built was a homegrown C-based IPC system called Plasma. The message channel was an mmap'd file used as a ring buffer. All messages were human-readable, performance was good, configuration was trivial. What was especially useful (and unusual in IPC systems it seems) was the property that message channels outlive all readers and writers, and even survive reboots, because they're just files. For local IPC you don't need a broker or server process. All the engineers who ever worked at Oblong loved Plasma, so I've recreated and updated it, as Plasmite. It's written in Rust and the message format is JSON, but it's fast because it's based on lite3 (https://lite3.io/index.html), a really cool project you should also check out. Bindings for Python, Go, Node, and C, but you can also get a lot done with just the CLI tools. The basic commands are - "feed" (to write) - "follow" (to tail) - "fetch" (to read one) - "duplex" (to have a 2-way session) I think duplex could be great for agent-agent communication, but I haven't tried this much yet. If you do, let me know!
Does the same job
all alternatives →- NCNanosecond C message logger2019 · ▲131
Hello, Some time ago I did a data logger for fun, just to check if I could beat the performance of an old C++ project of mine (mini-async-log) and to avoid letting my multithreading-C skills rust when on a non-programming gig (using Yocto/OE, very little programming). This project is a BSD licensed, producer-wait-free (when using thread-local storage) generic message logger with high performance, decent test coverage, and type-safe C strings (requires C11 or C++ compiler). It was a shame to let this project to die unknown, as I think that it has potential to be used on some niches as…
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After seeing a cool demo of a hack on Twitter, I built a cross platform version of it that works well and uses streaming. From anywhere on Mac and Linux, trigger Ollama and optionally feed it your clipboard. I built it yesterday and it's already very useful to me. I'm pretty excited about it and wanted to share!
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This was submitted before but it didn't seem to get much attention because I don't think the title was very descriptive and the submitter was brand new. I almost didn't click it but once I did I thought the project was pretty awesome and had a lot of promise. Hope this doesn't violate the rules, I have no horse in the game, but the creator is here on the site so hopefully he'll be able to answer your questions.
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Launched alongside, March 2026
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