[Isolate-interest] Links provide one-way synchronous communication

[Doug Lea]

[Most of us responsible for second public draft have been either
traveling or busy hitting other deadlines or both, so replies
and discussions might be delayed.]

Sutanu Ghosh wrote:

> 
> What is the rationale behind not making Link fully
> bi-directional as Socket ? That way, both isolates can
> use the same Link for send and receive.
> 

The Link API is not intended to be an application-layer
API, so is not very user-friendly. The main goal was to specify
a small and efficient mechanism that can be provided
across the various implementation approaches to Isolates,
over which you can layer socket-like, IPC-like, RMI-like, JMS-like, etc
middleware frameworks. There have been some research reports by people
doing this. See for example, Krzysztof Palacz's Purdue PhD thesis (which
I can't find online at the moment) and paper's by Greg's
Sun labs groups at http://research.sun.com/projects/barcelona/

-Doug