Across binaries

Coming from Go? Splitting a program into services usually means rewriting in-process calls as RPC or queue clients. In Hale the publisher and subscriber code doesn’t change — a topic that was an in-process queue becomes a Unix socket or a broker by adding one line to main’s bindings { } block. The deployment seam is the only place that knows.

A topic is in-process by default

When a topic isn’t mentioned in any bindings { } block, it’s delivered by an in-process cooperative queue. Two loci in the same binary just talk. Nothing to configure.

Binding a topic to a transport

To carry a topic between binaries, name it in the main locus’s bindings { } block with a transport:

main locus App {
    bindings {
        MatchReady: unix("/tmp/matches.sock");
    }
    run() {
        Matchmaker { target_size: 4 };
    }
}

bindings { } is legal only on a main locus. The publisher’s MatchReady <- info; and the subscriber’s subscribe MatchReady as ... are unchanged — they don’t know or care that delivery now crosses a socket. The same locus source runs in a test (in-memory), a single binary (in-memory), and a multi-binary deployment (unix), chosen entirely at this seam.

The transports that ship

• In-process — the default; absence of a binding.
• unix("/path") — an AF_UNIX framed-byte transport, owned by the runtime. The role (listen vs connect) is inferred from whether the binary publishes or subscribes the topic; specify role: listen | connect when one binary does both.
• udp://host:port — datagram transport, including IPv4 multicast. Lossy by nature — right for tick streams and telemetry where stale-is-worthless.
• A user adapter — any locus you write that satisfies the __StdBusAdapter interface (a single send(subject, bytes) method). This is how NATS, MQTT, a raw-TCP framing, or a custom JSON-over-WebSocket transport plug in — as ordinary loci in your code, not language features:

  bindings {
      BrokerEvt: MyNatsAdapter { url: "nats://prod:4222" };
  }

The substrate stays neutral on protocol semantics — reliability, ordering, retries, backpressure all live in the adapter body, where they belong.

Talking to other languages: codecs

By default the bus uses Hale’s internal wire format, which is fine Hale-to-Hale but opaque to a consumer in another language. When you need JSON over a socket or protobuf to a Python peer, a binding names a codec — a locus that owns encode/decode:

bindings {
    Tick: unix("/tmp/ticks.sock") codec(TickJsonCodec { });
}

The codec is structurally typed against the topic’s payload (encode takes the payload type, decode returns it) and must be pure — no hidden state — because it runs on transport threads. Different bindings on the same topic can carry different codecs; the publisher’s send site doesn’t know which.

The shape this gives you

A single source tree, decomposed into loci that coordinate over topics. How those topics are delivered — same process, same machine over a socket, across the network via a broker — is a deployment decision living in bindings { }, separate from the logic. You design the system once and deploy it many ways. The systems tier adds one more transport for the highest-frequency same-machine routes: shared-memory zero-copy.

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That’s the services tier: lifecycle, a typed bus, concurrency and placement, supervised parent/child trees, structural failure, and multi-binary deployment. You can build daemons, servers, and distributed systems with this. The final tier goes under the runtime — memory, layout, raw performance, and the C boundary — for when you need that control.

Next: Memory & lifetime.