That might be not what Alan Kay meant, but here's one description of fundamental problems with RPC: [1]
[...] the fundamental problem is
that RPC tries to make a distributed invocation look like a local one.
This can't work because the failure modes in distributed systems are
quite different from those in local systems, so you find yourself
having to introduce more and more infrastructure that tries to hide
all the hard details and problems that lurk beneath. That's how we got
Apollo NCS and Sun RPC and DCE and CORBA and DSOM and DCOM and EJB and
SOAP and JAX-RPC, to name a few off the top of my head, each better
than what came before in some ways but worse in other ways, especially
footprint and complexity. But it's all for naught because no amount of
infrastructure can ever hide those problems of distribution. Network
partitions are real, timeouts are real, remote host and service
crashes are real, the need for piecemeal system upgrade and handling
version differences between systems is real, etc. [...]
Comments
That might be not what Alan Kay meant, but here's one description of fundamental problems with RPC: [1]
[...] the fundamental problem is that RPC tries to make a distributed invocation look like a local one. This can't work because the failure modes in distributed systems are quite different from those in local systems, so you find yourself having to introduce more and more infrastructure that tries to hide all the hard details and problems that lurk beneath. That's how we got Apollo NCS and Sun RPC and DCE and CORBA and DSOM and DCOM and EJB and SOAP and JAX-RPC, to name a few off the top of my head, each better than what came before in some ways but worse in other ways, especially footprint and complexity. But it's all for naught because no amount of infrastructure can ever hide those problems of distribution. Network partitions are real, timeouts are real, remote host and service crashes are real, the need for piecemeal system upgrade and handling version differences between systems is real, etc. [...]
[1] http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2008-May/035209...