Names system

[jmderuty]

A few thoughts about a potential names system in Stormancer:

Definition: Names are immutable strings defined at compilation, and never changed afterwards. Names are for instance:

• Route names
• Service identifiers
• Error ids
• plugin specific ids & name

Currently we use different approach for names according to the context, for instance route names are exchanged during the initial connection handshake between 2 peers, and replaced by ushort handles afterwards, whereas most other names are transmitted on the wire whenever they are used.

A global name system would associate each name to an unique integer and use these integer for communication, comparison, etc...

Goal:

• Reduced bandwidth usage when sending names
• Reduced allocations by keeping a single string in memory, for human visualisation only.
• Runtime & compile time introspection of names, for instance to list all possible error ids.
• Extensibility. Most names are declared in server/client plugins,
• Sharing names & handles between clients (at runtime, or compile time?)
• Name collision
• Change management (versioning? what about name deletion? and name updates ? if the string representation of a name changes, do we want it to keep being recognized as its old name by older clients? (maybe, but what consequences?))
• Other?