Mark S. Miller wrote:
Much of the early Actors research
DEC SRC Network Objects
RMI
Original-E before I arrived at Electric Communities
Midori
Orleans
AmbientTalk
Cap'n Proto
Mark (and Tom, cc'ed), please take this as sincere feedback from a fan
-- I mean this in the best possible way:
I remember the mid-late '80s to '90s RPC wars, Sun RPC vs. Apollo RPC,
Ken Birman et al.'s work at Cornell (and on Wall Street back end
systems), CORBA, Java RMI, all that. I have some scars myself.
That history, plus some of the names dropped above, form a large
super-counterexample in my opinion. Lessons painfully learned:
* One cannot ignore network latency and partitioning.
* Sync RPC is the wrong model (it already yielded to async calls,
futures/promises, and the like).
* Weak consistency (I know, people hear "CAP" and give up too much) won,
which surprised some.
* As Mike Stonebraker observes, hardware trade-offs flipped upside down
with a vengeance.
The example of the Web, messy as it is, shows a success story so big
that we live inside it without often being conscious of it, like happy
fish in bubbly water. True, it's still too client/server, too
"stateless" with login and session state built into silos on server
networks, too subject to dreary XSS and CSRF threats. I agree it is not
the full distributed system that it should be.
But are we really going to build distributed-GC systems at Web scale,
with mutual suspicion and accidental failure accounted for?
It's as far as I know fair to say that Erlang is used in "mutual trust"
settings, even though "trust" means "assume failure happens, deal with
it as part of the design". So, Erlang is good for systems that
distribute across a server peer-to-peer network, but not yet
demonstrated as good for client/server/p2p/Web in full. Perhaps it or a
language/system it inspired (Go, Rust) will break out across the Web,
but this is in the future.
If we must go once more unto the distributed-GC breach, it would give me
more confidence to see some literature outside the
OCap/RPC/tightly-coupled/research/unshipped-OS world, which AFAIK has
never been demonstrated at anything approaching Web scale.
Something built on the Web and even deployed to cite along with the
listed names above would be better. What cowpath could we pave?
/be
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