[e-lang] E-on-CL progress, and request for information

[Mark Miller]

Kevin Reid wrote:
> Do I correctly understand that the boot-comm system *is* what all  
> intra-process inter-vat communication happens on?

No. Boot-comm is currently only for bootstrapping further operation. In 
general, vats speak to each other over Pluribus, whether they're in the same 
JVM or not.

Even if the boot-comm system used full serialization, the reason not to use it 
in general between vats in the same JVM, even though it would be more 
efficient, is that the two comm systems do not recognize each other. If Alice 
has a boot-comm reference to Carol and a CapTP reference to Bob, then, when 
Alice says 'bob.foo(carol)', CapTP, seeing an eventual reference argument it 
does not understand, treats it as a promise local to Alice. An 
inter-comm-system introduction can never be shortened.

For the sake of efficiency, it would be good to somehow extend Pluribus to 
recognize when it's communicating within a process, and to use the technique 
you suggest for short circuiting serialization. That would be an interesting 
piece of engineering.

-- 
Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain

     Cheers,
     --MarkM