### The cases in which peers crash in response

We'll first consider that a component may crash inside or outside of a synchronous block. From the point of view of the peer component, we'll have four cases to consider:

Because the crashing component is potentially unaware of the component IDs it will end up notifying that it has failed, we can not design the crash-handling algorithm in such a way such that the crashing component notifies the peers of when they have to crash. We'll do the opposite: the crashing component simply crashes and somehow attempts to notify the peers. Those peers themselves decide whether they have to crash in response to such a notification.

We'll go back to the four cases we've discusses above. We'll change our point of view: we're now considering a component (the "handling component") that has to deal with the failure of a peer (the "crashing component"). We'll introduce a small part of our solution a-priori: like a component shutting down, a failing component will simply end its life by broadcasting `ClosePort` message over all of its owned ports that are not closed (and, like the other control algorithms. the failing component will wait for the port that is shutting down to become unblocked before it will send the `ClosePort` message).

In the second case we have that the peer component died before we ourselves have entered the synchronous block. This case is somewhat equivalent to the case we described above. The crashing component cannot have sent the handling component any messages. So we mark the port as closed, potentially failing in the future if they end up being used. However, the handling component itself might've performed `put` operations already. So now that the handling component receives a `ClosePort` message, it realizes that those earlier `put` operations can never be acknowledged. For this reason a component stores when it last used a port in the metadata associated with a port. When, in this second case, a `ClosePort` message comes in while the port has been used already, the handling component should crash as well.

Next up is the third case, where both the crashing component and the handling component were both in the same synchronous round. Like before we mark the port as closed and future use will cause a crash. Like the second case, if the handling component has already used a port (which in this case may also be having received a message from the crashing component), then it should crash as well.

The fourth case is where the failing component crashes *after* the handling component finished its sync round. This is an edge cases dealing with the following situation: both the handling as the crashing component have submitted their local solution to the consensus algorithm (assumed to be running somewhere in a thread of execution different from the two components). The crashing component receives a global solution, finishes the sync round, and then crashes, therefore sending the `ClosePort` message to the handling component. The handling component, due to the asynchronous nature of the runtime, receives the `ClosePort` message before the global solution has a chance to reach the handling component. In this case, however, the handling component should be able to finish the synchronous round, and it shouldn't crash.

### Distinguishing the crashing cases

So far we've pretended like we could already determine the relation between the crashing component's synchronous round and the handling component's synchronous round. But in order to do this we need to add a bit of extra information to the `ClosePort` message.

The simplest case is to determine if the two components are both in the same synchronous round (case three, as described above). The crashing component annotates the `ClosePort` message with whether it was in a synchronous round or not. Then if both components are in a synchronous round (as checking by the handling component), and the about-to-be-closed port at the handling component was used in that round, or will be used in that round, then the handling component should crash.

Equally simple: the handling component can figure out itself if it is in a synchronous round (case one, as described above). If not: then the port is marked closed and future use causes crashes.

The last two cases require a bit more work: how do we distinguish the edge case where the handling component's round will complete in the future, from the case where it should crash. To distinguish the edge case we need the handling component to know if the last interaction the crashing component handled was the one in the handling component's current synchronous round.

For this reason we keep track of the synchronous round number. That is to say: there is a counter that increments each time a synchronous round completes for a component. We have a field in the metadata for a port that registers this round number. If a component performs a `put` operation, then it stores its own round number in that port's metadata, and sends this round number along with the message. If a component performs a `get` operation, then it stores the *received* round number in the port's metadata.

When a component closes a port, it will also send along the last registered round number in the `ClosePort` message. If the handling component receives a `ClosePort` message, and the last registered round number in the port's metadata matches the round number in the `ClosePort` message, and the crashing component was not in a synchronous round, then the crashing component crashed after the handling component's sync round. Hence: the handling component can complete its sync round.

To conclude: if we receive a `ClosePort` message, then we always mark the port as closed. If the handling and the crashing component were in a synchronous round, and the closed port was used in that synchronous round, then the handling component crashes as well. If the handling component *is* in a synchronous round but the crashing component *is not* in a synchronous round, the port of the handling component is used in the synchronous round and the port's last registered round number does not match the round number in the `ClosePort` message, then the handling component crashes as well.

- The work queue in the runtime is still a mutex-locked queue. The `QueueMpsc` type should be extended to be a multiple-producer multiple-consumer queue. This type should then replace the mutex-locked work queue.