This make me ask, would it be possible and reasonable to make a rudimentary foreign-function interface using TCP sockets and serializing data to strings, instead of reinventing the FFI wheel again? True, it would be inefficient, but it would not be too difficult to do (say, using YAML [1] as the serialization format), it would give access to many libraries fast, and as a bonus you could run the library service remotely.
Ferrying complex objects with binary data over the link is not going to be pleasant in that scheme, though. And it would be difficult to conceive a generic function call protocol without reinventing RPC or SOAP.
