Shall we change how ports and connections are managed?

[syifan]

I want to ask the community about your feelings about the design of the Akita Port/Connection/Msg system. In specific, I have two questions.

1. Shall we change the port design from bidirectional to uni-directional?
2. Shall we limit a Direct connection to only being able to connect two ports?

Why are we considering the change? This is mainly because we have observed several drawbacks to the current design.

1. Since a connection can connect to many ports, the connection needs to know the destination of the message. This requires the components to manage the possible destinations. However, managing destinations produces many problems. For example, many components may have fields that represent remote ports. It creates confusion to users as they cannot easily tell local ports and remote ports in the components' field list. Also, we typically need complex mechanisms to identify the destination (e.g., LowModuleFinder).
2. There is no arbiter that determines which port can sent. So all the ports compete for the opportunities to send.

What are the cons if we want to add the limitation?

1. Current components need to be updated.
2. Simulator developers will need to implement switches explicitly.

If we make the change, we will release it in our next major v4 release.

Please let us know what you think about this change.

[syifan]

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