Building a broadcast system that'll eventually gossip messages between nodes. Starting simple with just one node to get the basic message handling solid.
Stores broadcast messages in memory
Handles three main operations:
broadcast: Takes a message (integer) and saves it
read: Returns all messages we've seen
topology: Gets network topology info (not used yet but will be key for gossip)
Using a server struct with:
Thread-safe message storage (slice + mutex)
Clean message type definitions
Separate handlers for each operation
Key design choices:
Used slice instead of map since we just need to store unique integers
RWMutex for better read performance (multiple readers can access simultaneously)
Message copying in read handler to prevent external modifications
Using slice for storage (simple but O(n) lookup)
Copying full message list on reads (safe but not memory efficient)
Storing topology even though we don't use it yet (preparing for 3b)
These are fine for single-node but we'll need to revisit some choices when we add multi-node support.
