[Agents] Components cannot receive initial state when connecting to non-worker agents

[jstarry]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Non-worker agents cannot respond to a connection directly

Describe the solution you'd like
New trait for synchronous non-worker Agents which allows agents to respond immediately when it's connected to.

[Follpvosten]

I would be very much looking forward for such a trait!

Currently, an (admittedly very small, nitpicky) downside of using Agents for managing shared component state is that every message is getting serialized, which theoretically wouldn't be required if everything's running synchronously on the main thread (if I got that right).
So removing the Serialize/Deserialize bound on Input and Output could be another potential benefit of this, along with a very small performance improvement that might come with that.

[happysalada]

Does the title of this issue mean that there is a way for a component to receive a state when connecting to a worker agent?

I have been looking for a way to have a synchronous connection, exactly for the purpose of receiving initial state. I couldn't find anything, in the examples and the code that would enable a worker agent to do this.

to be clear, I looked at the multi-threaded and the pub_sub example.

I would be keen on adding an "Initial state from agent" example if I knew where to begin.

[jstarry]

@happysalada there isn't currently a way. But it would be a very nice feature to add!

[ranile]

Non-worker agents are gone as of #2295