Re: IDEA: Shared Buffers

Luke Gorrie <[email protected]> writes:

> Luke Gorrie <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> > But I had it first :-) http://www.bluetail.com/~luke/shbuf/
> 
> I'm running a shbuf server at monkey.m68k.org. If you load it, you
> can do `M-x shbuf-connect' to join in!

Me and David are there now. Here's the current transcript. Of course,
you can't see who said what.. :-)

-----------

List of people in thThis is a test, I really

  Luke
  David "big D" Wallin

Insert your name :-)

You can use `M-x shbuf-takeover' to become the master. Otherwise, you
can't write to the buffer.

There is some basic consistency handling, so that in race conditions
between you typing something and someone else becoming master, your
uncommited changes get rolled back in the local buffer.

Holy crap, I even documented this program. It must be *old*! 

Hey, did someone join? :)

Yeah. Well, it's easy to implement :-). Now I'm looking for some Emacs
graphics hacks to try. I don't think `M-x tetris' will work in this
buffer because I don't send text properties like colours, but maybe
there is something similar. A general problem is that if I change
modes in the buffer, it doesn't change yours.

This makes it a little easier to do the takeovers: 
  (local-set-key "\C-C\C-t" 'shbuf-takeover)

Better clean up the buffer a bit incase someone else joins :-)

It would be nice to track motion of the point as well. I'm not sure if
it would need to be done in a slightly lazy way to cut down on
messages, or if that wouldn't matter. Maybe sync it every 250ms or so.


Yeah, I don't know, In my head I imagined the buffer to be more like a
pasteboard... But emacs offers some neat other stuff like the animate
string thing :)

It's interesting to consider how shared buffers could be used for
distributed programming. I mean, Erlang's async-messaging is one way,
'tuple spaces' are another. Would shbufs be a useful one too?

Could Mnesia be written on shbufs? ;-)

what would you call this type of distrbuted paradigm?

I'm not sure. It's exciting to think that, perhaps, it's new - at
least in the sense that nobody has seriously used it because it
isn't/didn't-look-like a good idea :-). Hey, we could pretend to be
researchers :-)

Me likes :)



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