I'm not talking about any particular implementation. You could use openmpi. Or posix/sysv shm. Or whatever win32's equivalent is. Or any other facility—many languages have something like this built into their standard library.
> I'm not talking about any particular implementation.
Sure, but this needs to map to some implementation in the real world to be a meaningful sentiment. Surely you are aware there is zero standard for the functionality you're referring to. This leaves you with recommending OpenMPI, the only reliable cross-platform implementation of the functionality.
If you don't care about cross-platform compatibility you might as well just hook straight into syscalls, which is referred to on linux (what you seem to be referring to) as shm.
Please make your substantive points without swipes like "Surely you are aware". I know it doesn't seem like much, but it lands very harshly with the other person, and tends to lead to worse.
Discussions like this are otherwise so high-quality that they're really worth taking care with.
> Surely you are aware there is zero standard for the functionality you're referring to.
Aside from being patently false—shared memory is standardized by IEEE 1003.1 POSIX[1][2][3] and supported on all modern unices—that's a pretty disingenuous and bad-faith assertion. But anyway:
1. 'shmem' refers generally to the ability of memory pages to mapped into multiple processes' address spaces. The existence (or lack thereof) of any particular implementation does not invalidate the broad point, which refers to a capability which tends to be implemented in some way on arbitrary platforms. Of course, if you want to develop a particular application which uses shared memory, you will want to make decisions about which platforms you want to support and how you want to support them. Of course, this may involve using platform abstraction layer (like openmpi), or building your own, or intentionally tying yourself to a platform or group of platforms. None of that has any bearing on my point, but it does lead to:
2. The functionality referred to in the linked video—that of composing multiple disparate applications with pipes—is one that is uniquely associated with unix. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that any critique of said functionality operates within the framework of unix. And all unices newer than 30 years implement sysv shmem[4].
Please make your substantive points without swipes like "that's a pretty disingenuous and bad-faith assertion". I know there was something of a provocation, but you'll represent your point of view much better (not to mention not poisoning the commons further) if you ignore that bit.
Discussions like this are otherwise so high-quality that they're really worth taking care with. (Also, all of us longtime Lisp programmers should have a horror of what happens when swipes start to take over technical discussions.)
