From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
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Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:32:30 -0500
Message-ID: <a4e6962a0907181232j53c35fddv8bf4e140f49b8c45@mail.gmail.com>
From: Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
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Subject: Re: [9fans] channels across machines
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On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Bakul Shah<bakul+plan9@bitblocks.com> wrot=
e:
>
> I should've mentioned this won't run on top of plan9 (or
> Unix). =A0What I really want is alt! =A0I brought up RPC but
> really, this is just Limbo's "chan of <type>" idea. =A0In the
> concurrent application where I want to use this, it would
> factor out a bunch of stuff and simplify communication.
>
> The chanconnect("<host>:<port>") syntax was to get the idea
> across. =A0A real building block might look something like
> this:
>
> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0int fd =3D <get a pipe end to something somehow>
> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0Chan c =3D fd2chan(fd, <marshalling functions>);
>

getting a pipe end to something somehow is why you really want to
leverage the namespace as a 9p file system.  <host>:<port> is really a
legacy concept that often locks you into a way of thinking or a
particular transport.  The typed channels (or for that matter file
system interfaces) is an interesting topic, and there have been some
folks thinking about it, but I'm not sure they are ready to share
their thoughts yet.

     -eric