In my previous blog entry, I answered a user question about how MPI defines its global constants, specifically in the context of interactions with other languages.

I went beyond that answer, and also explained why MPI does not define an ABI.

In this entry, I'll go into the "how does MPI interact with other languages?" part of the question.

Let me start off by saying: MPI officially only defines bindings for C and Fortran.

MPI-2 defined C++ bindings, but those have been deprecated and later deleted (they were quite complicated to maintain - there were many C++-specific errata during the MPI-2 timeframe - and very few people used them).

But the point remains: other languages are heating up in HPC these days.  For example, scripting languages are becoming popular again.

You obviously get lower raw performance from scripting languages than C or Fortran, but that's not necessarily the goal.  There's a wide range of applications that can gain huge performance benefits from parallelization, even if they leave a little performance on the table due to language runtime overhead.  The typical argument is that prototyping and productivity are higher in scripting languages than C (and possibly Fortran).

• mpi4py (MPI for Python) is likely the best example of a well-supported, active scripting language project for MPI.
• There's a few commercial products out there, too, such as Matlab's Parallel Computing Toolbox.
• There's a minor resurgence of using MPI with Java (e.g., bundled in Open MPI). Java's not quite a scripting language, but it fits the category of "not C or Fortran," so I included it in this list.  There were several Java MPI variants in the late '90s, most (all?) of which no longer exist.
• And finally, there's a bunch of old, unmaintained MPI-based inter-language projects available (Google for them).  These reflect interest and desire to interface to MPI, but have become abandonware over time.

MPI's support for non-C/Fortran languages is mainly comprised of two things:

1. "That which works with C, works with MPI."  This is not as trite as it sounds: the point here is that many scripting languages include some type of back-end interface to C.  Hence, using this interface, one can effectively create an MPI interface inanylanguage that has a good interface to C.
2. MPI-3.0 added the MPI_MPROBE suite of functions.  One of its explicit goals was targeted at scripting languages: provide the ability to safely receive a message of unknown size.

Honestly, that's pretty weak support for non-C/Fortran languages.  

Even though the MPI Forum is unlikely to support languages other than C or Fortran in the near term, I'd be interested in hearing from readers what you need from MPI to support your language.

Is better inter-language operability support something that the MPI Forum should add in MPI-4?  If so, what does it look like?  What kinds of hooks would be necessary?  What kinds of interfaces and functionality would be useful?

FWIW, I asked this question to the Perl CPAN community in 2009, but didn't get any response.  Is there any more interest these days?