Exploring polyglot software frameworks in ALICE with FairMQ and fer

In order to meet the challenges of the Run 3 data rates and volumes, the ALICE collaboration is merging the online and offline infrastructures into a common framework: ALICE-O2. O2 is based on FairRoot and FairMQ, a message-based, multi-threaded and multi-process control framework. In FairMQ, processes (possibly on different machines) exchange data via message queues either through 0MQ or nanomsg. In turn, this enables developers to write their reconstruction or analysis process in whatever language they choose or deem appropriate for the task at hand, as long as that programming language can send and receive data through these message queues. This paper introduces fer, a Go-based toolkit that interoperates with the C++ toolkit FairMQ, to explore the realm of polyglot distributed frameworks.