2 posts tagged with "decentralized"

Distributed time-sensitive systems must balance consistency (agreement on shared information) and availability (responding within timing bounds). Lingua Franca's decentralized coordination exposes this tradeoff through two attributes: maxwait and absent_after. This post walks through examples from Paladino, Li, and Lee's "Maxwait: A Generalized Mechanism for Distributed Time-Sensitive Systems," showing that many classical distributed coordination strategies and common patterns—Chandy–Misra with or without null messages, ACID/CRDT-style coordination-free execution, optimistic execution with rollback, logical execution time (LET), publish-subscribe, actors, and RPC with futures—amount to choosing appropriate maxwait and absent_after values. See the related LF meeting recording.

The design of distributed applications in Lingua Franca requires care, particularly if the coordination of the federation is decentralized. The intent of this post is to illustrate and handle the challenges arising from designing distributed applications in Lingua Franca, with the help of two realistic use cases.