[Twisted-Python] What rough protocol, its hour come at last, slouches towards Austin to be born?

[Allen Short]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2002, Glyph Lefkowitz did violence to a keyboard thusly:

> I just checked in a substantial refactoring and change to Jelly,
> finalizing what I think Jelly ought to look like in PB's wire protocol. 
> Before I declare that it is well and truly standard, however, there are
> a few things I'd like to resolve, and I'd be interested to hear a few
> opinions on them...
> 
> 1: use of the word "tuple".
> 
> Jelly uses the word "tuple" on the wire, which is fairly
> Python-specific.  Really it ought to be "immutable-list" or something
> similar (perhaps leaving the door open for more immutable types in the
> future?).  Thoughts on this, especially from implementors in other
> languages?

More immutable types would be nice, yes. (Oz, for example, has 'records'
which in effect are immutable dicts.) I dont know if there's any
advantage to making 'immutable' a separate protocol element or if such
data structures should just be identified as such in their name.... for
that matter. 'tuple' isn't the worst thing you could call it -- i dont
think jelly would suffer from being called unabashedly python-centric.
:)

> 2: jellying of arguments/kwargs
> A couple of possible small improvements come to mind:

> * provide alternate forms of proto_message which alternatively do or
>   do not send arguments, keyword args, or either

To my mind, this seems the cleanest way to solve it.

> 4: always assume exactly one reference
> 
> some work is probably wasted right now in maintaining distributed
> reference counts; the peer really only cares whether the other side has
> a reference or it doesn't.  The one place that this is a little weird is
> the decache/uncache handshake.

well, my opinion on enforcing single referece counts has been expressed
before :) this would be quite nice but i'm unsure how it would interact
with Python semantics... would jelly refuse to send refs to objects that
it had already sent?

-- 
Allen Short         Programmer-Archaeologist        
washort at twistedmatrix.com
"optimization is hacker crack. " -- Johan Kullstam, c.l.l