Re: [9fans] About IL

[Charles Forsyth <charles.forsyth@gmail.com>]

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On 20 October 2015 at 17:14, Adriano Verardo <adriano.verardo@mail.com>
wrote:

> Could IL be actually more effective than TCP/IP in a closed net ?
> I think about a robotic application using very small cpus.
> What about Styx -- ore something similar - over IL ?
>

Styx is (now) the same as 9P, and it was always similar: not a transport
protocol, but a service protocol that ran on any suitable transport,
and not just on IP networks. We used a special link-level transport
protocol over infra-red to use Styx to talk to a programmable Lego brick
from Inferno. It did run-length encoding, and possibly some other
compression scheme.

All you need is a transport protocol that reliably preserves content and
order. It doesn't need to keep record boundaries,
although transport protocols are sometimes simpler if you do, working with
messages instead of a raw byte stream.
It doesn't need to be an Internet Protocol (ie, there doesn't need to be an
IP layer). 9P itself will multiplex many clients
on the same connection to a server, so you don't need a higher-level
multiplexing protocol using ports etc.
In fact, using attach names, you can have several different server trees
served on the same connection to many different clients.

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