References
The fundamental difference of Dust is that it considers the software (all of them without exceptions) a state machine. The software is built up from components having many attributes and connections to each other, but both the attributes and the connections are managed and kept inside the framework runtime environment, can be accessed and managed by framework API calls. The software code on the other hand is responsible only for handling events, and not for representing the system state. That is: no "main" function, no waiting cycles and polling, and no final and static variables, local buffers for storing system state information.
Whenever a code (an internal event handler of a component instance) wants to access another component, it can do so only through dust API calls, and only by a component (Aspect) reference that it has received from the incoming message, its own existing component links or by searching for entities using API calls. The code has a very short life: runs only to respond a message (and not to represent a "listening state" for example), and has no need to "remember" any component or state (except for storing such information in its own or other components' attributes).
This means that the Dust runtime is free to handle the actual entity instances behind the API wall as it wants. It is totally irrelevant if the instance is purged from memory and reloaded, replaced with another instance ("dll hell"), exists or temporarily moved to another computer - as long as its attributes are reachable and messages can be sent to it using their references.
