Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I'm not very networking-wise, got a question: is the "local machine" alwyas a well-defined thing? I'm thinking about stuff like where hosts are transparently distributed. Maybe there are systems out there that take advantage of resolving localhost to other than 127.* in order to make applications easy to transparently migrate when scaling servers out, or something?


We have a reasonably distributed system. Localhost only ever occurs in a testing environment.


No, if your application is distributed, you won't be referring to localhost.


And why not?

If we are running distributed services, we know the machine that the code is run on is running. We can even reference this by many languages version of "this" keyword.

localhost is only "this" for IP4/6


I think the GP meant that the client won't be calling on the server through 'localhost', at least not as a hard-coded parameter.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: