[E-Lang] an example impatience policy (was: remote comms)

[Karp, Alan]

I agree with your point about providing reliable, and even persistent,
messaging as part of the infrastructure.  However, such messaging systems
impose some additional overhead.  I believe it is also important to provide
low latency messaging.  After all, I may benefit from 1 ms response between
two components running on the same physical machine.  The question then
becomes where to stop.

Our philosophy in e-speak was "If you don't need it, you don't pay for it."
Thus, our base messaging was asynchronous, best effort ala UDP.  On top of
that we added reliable messages with retries ala TCP.  Next, we added
persistent messaging for handling network disconnections ala email.
Finally, the plan is to add transactions.  Each has a different use and is
provided by a different library routine.  We may have done something right,
because each of the first 3 has been used in somebody's product, and people
are asking for the fourth.

_________________________
Alan Karp
Principal Scientist
Decision Technology Department
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories MS 1U-2
1501 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(650) 857-3967, fax (650) 857-6278
https://ecardfile.com/id/Alan_Karp
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