Mastering Apache Pulsar

Chapter 13. The Future

Pulsar began with the goal of being a general-purpose system for event streams and queues. Today the goals for Pulsar are more ambitious. Pulsar aims to be not just a messaging system, but a general-purpose storage engine and complete event platform. Pulsar also aims to support anyone on their streaming journey by supporting a proxy framework. What components are needed to make this ambitious goal a reality? This chapter isn’t a comprehensive look at Pulsar’s future; instead, it’s my opinion of the areas worth tackling next. My opinions are colored by my experience building systems that use Pulsar or similar technology.

Programming Language Support

Pulsar has support for Java, Python, and Go officially, with many unofficial clients for other programming languages provided by the community. Official language support means that the Pulsar open source project maintains the implementation for that client. Pulsar’s adoption in the broader ecosystem hinges partially on its ability to reach programmers with whatever tools they are comfortable with. Language support extends beyond client libraries to Pulsar Functions and even Pulsar IO implementations. Supporting the top 25 most popular programming languages is an undertaking that shouldn’t be placed solely on the shoulders of Pulsar source contributors. Providing a native, language-specific implementation is a time-consuming ordeal and not necessarily a core function of Pulsar. With these limitations, how should ...