NarrowWaist

"Hour-glass" shaped architectures that squeeze information between two broad systems through a narrow (more restricted / simple channel)

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/03/backlog-arch.html

When you hear the term, you should picture an hourglass with M things on one side, N on the other, and an important concept in the middle. Recap:

• A narrow waist is concept, interface, or protocol that solves an interoperability problem.
• It avoids O(M × N) code explosions, letting us write O(M + N) amounts of code instead.
• This is a big deal in practice! Most code is glue, but it doesn't have to be this way.
• Byte streams and text are essential narrow waists in software, particularly in #distributed-systems.

https://www.oilshell.org/cross-ref.html?tag=narrow-waist

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Perlis-Thompson-Principle