Lindsey Kuper"Carol's Causal Conundrum", the newest zine from my research group, is out today! 🎉 Read online and print your own free copies: https://decomposition.al/zines/
Thread! 👇
Benjamin Turner@lindsey Great zine, thank you! I'm curious... if Bob can't take any externally-observable actions once he receives Alice's eager message, then he still can't make dinner reservations until Carol acknowledges Alice's message and Alice sends Bob the You Can Tell message. Is the CYKAS method actually providing better throughput than synchronous messaging in this scenario?
@kindjar Ooh, good question! Here, "externally observable" means "observable to other processes in the system". Making a reservation doesn't count because other processes in the system can't see it happen.
(You could imagine a kind of side channel where Alice or Carol could call the restaurant and ask if Bob has made a reservation! But if communication can occur over side channels like that, then you're already out of luck with respect to any guarantee of causally ordered communication.)