tieflang.md

What if we specified “an RPC VM”?

Basically, lean into designing a basic language/repl/vm, with a plaintext and binary encoding format.

• State is maintained as “session IDs”
  • Every request can be one of:
    • “CREATE SESSION” - creates a new session id, returned to client
    • “EPHEMERAL” - “oneshot” actions, do a single function call
    • “RESUME SESSION” - the provided input should be run in the context of the given session id, or should not run at all
  • These sessions (and bound values) can be serialized and stored in a DB, or kept in RAM, or either, or none
  • Server may choose to discard/evict sessions whenever they feel like it
• Primitives are basically:
  • Binding values to IDs/names, within the session
  • Calling functions
    • Can pass values by IDs
    • Can bind return values to IDs
    • Do this forth/stack-machine style? But with stronger typing? like BoH in mnemos/forth3?
  • “recv/wait for input”
  • “send output”
    • Note: not everything gets “sent back” to the client. Only items that are actively sent.
• Some notion of spawn/fork? so you could stream responses while doing other requests. Also join?
  • Structured concurrency server side in general?
  • This seems like a bad idea
• Probably have some sort of “interpreter fuel” or “fuel rate” for rate limiting in CPU/network/ram time

Servers define the NOUNS and VERBS, clients define the FLOWS. Servers become libraries and vms.