[plt-scheme] Soft State in the PLT Web Server

On May 18, 2009, at 1:37 PM, Jay McCarthy wrote:

> From: http://jay-mccarthy.blogspot.com/2009/05/soft-state-in-plt-web-server.html
>
> Many Web applications and network protocols have values in the
> continuation that are necessary to complete the computation, but that
> may be recomputed if they are not available. This is "soft state".

BTW, this is related to an idea that I was thinking about a while ago  
w.r.t. debugging; state that cannot be recomputed, but which is not  
strictly necessary in order to complete the computation.  So, for  
instance, you might hold debugging information in such a way that it  
can be reclaimed if necessary, but at the cost of losing some  
debugging information.  This gives rise to a whole "spectrum of  
weakness"; that is: "Dear Mr. GC: you can reclaim this if you want,  
but I'd really rather you didn't."

It sounds like this idea might also be applicable in a web framework,  
where you might want to prioritize weakness by the degree of  
difficulty of recomputing the given piece of information.

John

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