Stations and presence

A station is the in-memory registration a session holds while it attends an address. attach creates the station and claims a liveness lease (an epoch) for the address; the exchange tracks the station’s health and any live waiter.

Presence is non-destructive

Detaching or a lease reap is non-destructive: the station and the durable message buffer remain. A blocked wait returns a distinct presence-ended result rather than losing the buffered messages. A later attach re-registers and continues.

Liveness backstop

attach --watch-pid anchor:<pid> registers a non-destructive liveness backstop. When the watched process dies, blocked waits return a presence-ended result, but the station and durable buffer are retained. This lets a station be cleaned up when its owning process goes away without dropping messages.

Inspecting stations

Get a machine-readable projection of a session’s attended addresses, waiter counts, and station health:

telex station status --session <id>

Stop a station as the symmetric inverse of the attach and wait loop; it marks the station non-attending, releases membership durably, and waits for tracked live waiters to exit:

telex station stop --address <addr>

After station stop, a later message to the address stays queued until a future attach or wait; it is not consumed by an orphaned waiter.

Next: Messages and threads