Serialization

[Mark Reinhold]

> Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:17:41 -0800
> From: Joshua Bloch <jjb at google.com>

> This is a moderately important decision. In Google's Java MapReduce API, we use
> SAM interfaces to represent Mapper and Reducer. Instances must be serializable,
> as they're serialized to pass them from the node that starts the MapReduce to
> the worker nodes (which do the actual mapping and reduction). That means we
> won't be able to use closure syntax for MapReduce, which seems like a shame.
> 
> This is no worse than what we do with SAM types today, but it's no better,
> either. Can we do better?

Maybe.  How would you suggest we address the concerns which Peter raised?

- Mark