[cap-talk] controversial article

[Ben Laurie]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 10:13 PM, Mark Miller<erights at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Karp, Alan H <alan.karp at hp.com> wrote:
>>
>> MarkM wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> While it is true that the infinite loop example only applies within a vat,
>> E's distributed semantics require unbounded message buffering in the same
>> sense in which its local semantics requires unbounded heap and stack.
>> Unbounded buffering requirements do not normally prevent a protocol from
>> claiming "liveness", FWIW.
>>
>> Does that mean buffering on the sender side is better for defensive
>> correctness?
>
> yes. Similarly, and more practically, bounding the receiver side buffer to a
> memory budget specific to a given sender, and doing sender side buffering
> when exceeding that limit is better... But one must be careful to account
> not only for the messages themselves, but also all the other bookkeeping
> memory that one side of a connection can force the other side to use.

Presumably this means that you are always limited to some finite
number of senders, then?

> This
> harkens back to Shap's criticism of membranes -- there are no good answers
> to who pays for the memory. My guess is that Shap's "good" here probably
> translates into a defensive correctness requirement (and therefore
> inability) for normal uses of membranes.
>
> --
> Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain
>
>    Cheers,
>    --MarkM
>
>
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