[Bro-Dev] [Bro] effects of &synchronized and &mergeable

[Vern Paxson]

> Seth and I have been mulling over this, and I'd be curious what others
> think about this. If we'd remove the &synchronized stuff, we could
> throw out a lot of C++-level code and complexity.

Hmmmm.  I've always liked that &sychronized gives us a general capability
rather than presupposing the nature of cross-Bro state coordination.
I take it your view is that we now have enough experiences with clusters
to conclude that we aren't making full use of the generality, so we should
consider the maintenance/complexity gains we could achieve by removing it.
Is that the right way to summarize it?

What about for non-cluster distributed deployments?  As I understand it,
LBL's "Deep Bro" vision is to coordinate Bros that are analyzing different
traffic streams (and with higher intercommunication latencies between those
Bros).  One thing I'm wondering is whether that use-case might still benefit
from more general semantics.

> We could even go a step further then and send events over that channel
> as well. And that in turn might let us eventually remove all the
> current communication code and replace with something nicer, maybe
> indeed an external library as we've been discussing earlier already.

Here do you mean essentially do explicit synchronization rather than
implicit?  Or do you mean changing the paradigm for how implicit
synchronization works?

		Vern