> You cannot pass functions, promises, or other non-serializable objects
Functions are serializable. And deserializable. You can absolutely take one defined on one machine, kick it over the wire, then execute it on another one. Likewise closures, you serialise the associated state as well.
Promises are the same thing - a distributed language runtime should be exactly the sort of graph execution system which lets you pass promises between machines and have things work out.
Further, they don't say what other "non-serializable" things are. Is a DAG serialisable without spuriously unrolling it into a tree and failing to fold back into a DAG at the other end? How about a graph? Given that all things are serializable it is difficult to guess what things they haven't implemented.
So by "they've got the implementation wrong", I'm saying they haven't implemented the tricky part of serialisation, only the copy ints over wires part. And by "wrong", I'm saying that a language runtime dedicated to transparently running typescript functions on other machines should be able to run those functions on other machines even if they have closed over state.
Author here. Absolutely agree with what you're saying.
Maybe the line could be written better. It is supposed to say: You can't pass functions and promises. And you can't pass in other data types that are not serialisable.
I definitely did not intend to say that functions or promises are not serialisable, and it is something we're looking into. The complexity is with serialising the closure state.
The other thing we're implementing is constraining the data types via the type system itself.
I'm guessing, but it should be possible to pass anything remotely as a proxy with an ID: calls to a closure or the resolution of a promise cause further RPC, and sending it back recovers the original value.
It’s technically correct but really we all know what was meant. They’re serialisable but not really deserialisable, even if it’s a pure function it might not even be serialised in a version of JS that the receiver understands.
JonChesterfield|2 years ago
Functions are serializable. And deserializable. You can absolutely take one defined on one machine, kick it over the wire, then execute it on another one. Likewise closures, you serialise the associated state as well.
Promises are the same thing - a distributed language runtime should be exactly the sort of graph execution system which lets you pass promises between machines and have things work out.
Further, they don't say what other "non-serializable" things are. Is a DAG serialisable without spuriously unrolling it into a tree and failing to fold back into a DAG at the other end? How about a graph? Given that all things are serializable it is difficult to guess what things they haven't implemented.
So by "they've got the implementation wrong", I'm saying they haven't implemented the tricky part of serialisation, only the copy ints over wires part. And by "wrong", I'm saying that a language runtime dedicated to transparently running typescript functions on other machines should be able to run those functions on other machines even if they have closed over state.
lunarcave|2 years ago
Maybe the line could be written better. It is supposed to say: You can't pass functions and promises. And you can't pass in other data types that are not serialisable.
I definitely did not intend to say that functions or promises are not serialisable, and it is something we're looking into. The complexity is with serialising the closure state.
The other thing we're implementing is constraining the data types via the type system itself.
edit: punctuation
lieks|2 years ago
winwang|2 years ago
williamdclt|2 years ago