[E-Lang] New Page: Partially Ordered Message Delivery

[Tyler Close]

I (Tyler) wrote:
> Most web sites don't support reference forking.

Given that both E and Joule use the reference forking model. I've been
persuaded that it's probably "the right choice".

Rather than giving up on forking, to support web sites, I've come up
with a different hack. If there are pending messages on an exported
reference, and the reference is to a web site that does not support
forking, then the forked reference is a smashed promise.

This means that certain uses of a web site will always fail, but I am
hoping that these uses will not be the common uses. So far, these new
semantics do not break any of the code I have that interacts with web
sites.

This gets rid of both the two-party ordering, and reference forking
issues in this thread. The only remaining issue is the merging of E's
"live" and "sturdy" references into a single "robust" reference. The
case I made for this merging is unchanged. This final point is the
most important one. It underlies all of the distributed code I've
written in Droplets. It really makes things a lot easier.

Tyler