[Info-vax] First ship poll: When will the first native x86-64 compilers ship ?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/16/2022 10:04 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 4/16/2022 7:00 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:
>> On 4/16/22 5:25 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
>>> On 4/16/2022 6:14 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>> On 4/16/2022 11:02 AM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
>>>>> And on the *definition* of "web services".
>>>>
>>>> There may not be a formal definition, but most developers have
>>>> a common understanding what such a thing is.
>>>>
>>>> Something like: a service intended to be used by client applications
>>>> based on web protocols typical XML/HTTP(S) or JSON/HTTP(S).
>>>
>>> Well, there you go again, refining the definition to match your 
>>> claims.  Of
>>> course that makes you right.
>>>
>>> How about anything that offers some service that might be needed over 
>>> the
>>> internet?
>>
>> Nope.  That would be an internet service.  A web service uses some
>> version of the HTTP protocol.  While that doesn't necessarily imply
>> REST, the simplicity of REST has made web services largely eclipse older
>> client-server protocols such as SOAP or Java RMI.
> 
> Having looked at REST, I find it as difficult and performance robbing as 
> the "rest" (no pun intended) of the "standard" protocols.  We have done 
> some testing.  We find that using sockets with no additional overhead 
> has given us the best performance and the least overhead and the 
> simplest programming.
> 
> I will admit that we already had a protocol in place, so that helped.
> 
> So, if we cannot be considered having a "web service", we don't care, 
> and we think our approach is better.
> 
> We still call them our "web services".

Sending binary messages over a permanent socket is very
efficient, but it is not a web service. The technology used
is not something invented for web.

Obviously there is a tradeoff - more efficient for
more work and tighter coupling.

But it certainly has its use case. A modern flavor
of this is Thrift. And depending on view gRPC can
can be seen as a hybrid between this and web service.

Web services are very popular but it is not the right
choice for everything.

Arne