Plasmite
a lightweight IPC system that's fun
Details
- External ID
- 47511435
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Plasmite
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- March 25, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 9
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5393603936039361
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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!
Enrichment
- Theme
- lightweight and on-device AI runtimes
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- lightweight ipc system
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 61 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #33 of 62 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 144 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Chatcode · hn · 2026-06-04 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Hyper · hn · 2026-07-09 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- BPU · hn · 2026-02-01 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Falcon · hn · 2026-02-24 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- A P2P messenger with dual network modes (Fast and Tor) · hn · 2026-04-02 · 39 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Clone, a small Rust VMM, forks VMs in under 20ms via CoW · hn · 2026-04-19 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Inverting Agent Model (App as Clients, Chat as Server and Reflection) · hn · 2026-02-03 · 24 upvotes · similarity 0.36
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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