Feature Request: The ability to serialize functions/closures

[gopherbot]

by kellrott:

Feature Request: The ability to produce some form of serialized closure that can be
transmitted to remote computers. This ability would make it much easier to design
distributed computing APIs.

[minux]

Comment 1:

how about shared data?
func test() {
  x := 0
  f := func() { x++ }
  // ..
}
if you serialize f in test() and send it to remote machine
and execute it three times, should x in the origin machine
change?
i don't think we can implement this in the general case.
please also consider the architecture of the remote machine
might not be the same.

[gopherbot]

Comment 2 by kellrott:

In practice all the only values the make it back to the origin machine are those
returned by the function. 
You can see this in practice at http://spark-project.org/ (Scala based). And python
closure serialization can be found at
http://pydoc.net/Python/cloud/2.3.9/cloud.serialization.cloudpickle/
As for machine architecture, distributed compute clusters tend to be homogeneous. If the
architecture doesn't match, then an error could be returned.

[cznic]

Comment 3:

Not feasible at runtime. Perhaps the source form can help sometimes.
#Unfortunate

[ianlancetaylor]

Comment 4:

I can't see this ever being implemented in the language or the standard libraries.  I
can imagine specific implementations in specific packages, but they would not in general
work with arbitrary functions, or they would only work when interpreted, not compiled.

Status changed to Unfortunate.