3 ms·
> Instead, the Internet Computer implements orthogonal persistence—yet another old idea where a program has the illusion of running “forever” and its memory st
by RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> Instead, the Internet Computer implements orthogonal persistence—yet another old idea where a program has the illusion of running “forever” and its memory staying alive (at least until it is explicitly taken down). In Motoko, this means that developers do not have to worry about explicitly saving their data or bother with files or an external database: whatever values or data structures are stored in program variables will still be there when the next message arrives, even if that is months later.
My guess is that storage persistence is the Godzilla of all leaky abstractions. There are huge tradeoffs in regards to consistency, durability, random access, performance, and cost. In addition, there are huge issues with lock-in. If I can save my data to sqlite or postgress or even S3, I know that I will be able to migrate the data to other languages and systems pretty easily. But if all my data is in a abstract "Internet Computer persistence pod", that is a huge issue.
- pavlov 6y agoThis model also seems to ignore data deletion, which is a huge concern for any serious business of any size. You can’t have users’ personal data lingering in a soup of opaque cloud continuations for months. There needs to be a way to strongly commit deletions and audit that the data is gone. And once you build that on top of the “Internet Computer”, my guess is that it will look disappointingly like a very slow ordinary database.