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There's a broadly-held idea that passing around compiled images ready to be copied into memory as software is too fragile, arcane and low-level and that we shou

by bcoates 13y ago

There's a broadly-held idea that passing around compiled images ready to be copied into memory as software is too fragile, arcane and low-level and that we should just put the human-readable source on the target machine to be consumed by the runtime. Isn't that directly equivalent to having a preference for a textual wire protocol?

lstamour 13y ago
I'm not sure the two relate. Textual is still made of bits, just more of them. As a stream, they can be checked via TCP for completeness and order, iirc. The danger, I suppose, is that they might be interpreted incorrectly, but that's why you've a versioned spec. Like SSL and HTTP itself, negotiate based on what the browser says it supports and the server prefers, and that's that. Binaries for software or "golden master" images for the OS are fragile not because they're binary, but because they aren't versioned as easily and they can deviate from the golden master. While on the web, a new golden master of your app/doc is a refresh away and there is such version negotiation.