On 10/25/07, Peter William Lount peter@smalltalk.org wrote:
Hi,
No, you'd not have to deep copy every time you send the messages. You can send references and when accessing them in the remote image (or image B if you prefer) you can ask the local image (or image A if you prefer) to send the missing data.
Or I can just not do that, do the deep copy and not have the problems mentioned in the rest of your mail. Again you are talking about something that *I'm not* and then explaining why *your approach* is hard to do.
Now this assumes that the objects in image A didn't change in the meantime. Yikes. Problems are getting worse. You can't avoid them. There is no silver bullet with this attempt at simplifying concurrency. It's a harsh reality.
Cheers,
Peter
The insight that Bell labs had with Unix over the mainframe makers was that *we don't need a silver bullet*. We need to get 90% and provide some way that the small % of people that need more can use.