[naasking]

> "Data can be resynchronized" - yeah, that means you send it again. Not exactly once.

"Send it again" doesn't mean "processed again". Isn't exactly-once built on at-least-once just binding the result to a future? Then any subsequent accesses or attempts to update will simply return the bound result, which was processed exactly once.

[lostcolony]

Which is what you -do- to handle 'at least once' delivery. The system can try and hide that complexity from you,but there are still tradeoffs in any implementation. How long in between does that guarantee hold? Does it guarantee that if you fire the same message a year from now it will still recall that it's a dupe (i.e., persist all message identifiers for an infinite amount of time)? Probably not. Does that matter to you? Maybe!

Even if it does persist, does it persist the identifier on receipt of the message, or on sending it to you for processing? If the former you run the risk of crash and never having handled it; you really have no guarantee of delivery to your processor. If the latter, what happens if the receiver crashes before it hands it off to be processed? If simultaneous, is 'processing' atomic? Probably not; what happens if you crash midway through processing the thing? Etc.

That's my point; you need more details to make the system robust. You don't get "exactly once delivery" out of the box; you get a system that attempts it by deduplicating, but there be gremlins, and the fact you're not saying "it's at least once delivery with (details)" means I'm not hearing a technical pitch, but a marketing one.

[naasking]

Futures have well-defined semantics as logic variables. The only question of actual interest that you raise is the lifetime. This is dictated either by the system or the dependent objects, although obviously "unbounded lifetime" handles all possible cases. So lifetime is not "undefined" but "contextual".