Deprecate global in favour of via

[Michał Muskała]

Currently, Elixir behaviours accept 3 ways of naming a process - a simple atom, a {:global, name} tuple, and a {:via, registry, name} one. While it's fine, the global naming always bothered me - being this special snowflake wrapped in it's own tuple. 

Exactly the same behaviour of passing {:global, name} is achieved by passing {:via, :global, name}. I propose we  deprecate the global tuple in favour of the via tuple. 

This allows reducing the amount of ideas there are to learn when first meeting processes by one thing, and we all know there are already many. Additionally this would leave a consistent scheme for calling gen* processes: an atom name, a two-tuple for locally registered process on another node, and a via tuple for registries.

Michał.

[José Valim]

While there are reasons for removing :global, there are also reasons for keeping it around:

1. It is kept in sync with Erlang options

2. It shows the global aspect is a mode of operation supported out of the box

3. Erlang OTP 20/21 will ship with a much improved global mode that may promote its use more 

I have considered supporting {:registry, Name, value} once we added Registry, to accompany bullet 2, but I haven't come up with a conclusion.

While there aren't strong reasons to keep it, there aren't also strong reasons to remove it, so I don't want to push people through a deprecation cycle unless we are certain which is the best way to go.

José Valim

www.plataformatec.com.br

Skype: jv.ptec

Founder and Director of R&D

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