Nicheloom visits: 58,301 all-time · 7,637 in the last 7 days

The opportunity tracker for new startups.

Today: 1,008 launches · Niche of the day: specialized calculation tools · See what launched today →

Plasmite

a lightweight IPC system that's fun

Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.

Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.

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!

HN · launched Mar 25, 2026 · 9 upvotes (top 46%) · 0 views

Niche: network and communication protocol libraries · 70 launches, 5 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

No Plasmite is a low-level inter-process communication library relying on shared memory (mmap), lockless ring buffers, concurrency primitives, and custom binary/text serialization in systems languages like C.

What it would actually take: Building Plasmite requires C or Rust systems programming expertise to implement lock-free concurrent ring buffers across processes using mmap. It needs deep knowledge of OS virtual memory semantics, cache coherence, atomic operations, and memory ordering guarantees. Robust debugging across platforms and crash recovery for uncoordinated IPC processes are the core engineering hurdles.

Discussion

1 comment analyzed.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 116 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #68 of 117 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 144 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.