There are some interesting descriptions of writing language kernels to allow a language previously unsupported by IPython to be executed from IPython.
In all cases, the kernel creation step involves using the target language's ZeroMQ bindings (since ZeroMQ is a major architectural component of IPython's front-end to kernel communication protocol).
In my company, a proprietary language was created a few years ago and is maintained with compilers to bytecode (with a bytecode runner written in C++), Flash, and JavaScript ... it's still heavily used today but it has never had anything like a REPL.
This language is a functional language similar to Haskell or SML, and it has no ZeroMQ bindings with no plans for the language maintainers to add any.
Is there a way to still write a kernel that can communicate with IPython?