"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful
tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor
less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean
so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master -
that's all."
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
On 28/01/2020 09:18, Richard Hipp wrote:
For many years I have described SQLite as being "serverless", as a way
to distinguish it from the more traditional client/server design of
RDBMSes. "Serverless" seemed like the natural term to use, as it
seems to mean "without a server".
But more recently, "serverless" has become a popular buzz-word that
means "managed by my hosting provider rather than by me." Many
readers have internalized this new marketing-driven meaning for
"serverless" and are hence confused when they see my claim that
"SQLite is serverless".
How can I fix this? What alternative word can I use in place of
"serverless" to mean "without a server"?
Note that "in-process" and "embedded" are not adequate substitutes for
"serverless". An RDBMS might be in-process or embedded but still be
running a server in a separate thread. In fact, that is how most
embedded RDBMSes other than SQLite work, if I am not much mistaken.
When I say "serverless" I mean that the application invokes a
function, that function performs some task on behalf of the
application, then the function returns, *and that is all*. No threads
are left over, running in the background to do housekeeping. The
function does send messages to some other thread or process. The
function does not have an event loop. The function does not have its
own stack. The function (with its subfunctions) does all the work
itself, using the callers stack, then returns control to the caller.
So what do I call this, if I can no longer use the word "serverless"
without confusing people?
"no-server"?
"sans-server"?
"stackless"?
"non-client/server"?
--
Regards
John McMahon
li...@jspect.fastmail.fm
When people say "The climate has changed before,"
these are the kinds of changes they're talking about.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
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