[erlang-questions] rpc is bad? (was Re: facebook chat server)

Claes Wikstrom klacke@REDACTED
Sat May 24 00:30:41 CEST 2008


Steve Vinoski wrote:

> It's related to the fallacies, yes. The fundamental problem of RPC,
> which is trying to make remote calls look local, is based on
> essentially trying to ignore the problems covered by the fallacies or
> trying to pretend they don't even exist. 


I really like the above paragraph. Ages ago when I was naive, and I'd just
implemented distributed erlang with the basic concepts like
spawn/4, link/1 and most importantly {Name, Node} ! Message
I then set out to build higher level libraries on top of those
basic low level mechanisms. We still see the traces of those efforts
in the otp libs today.

Think rpc:multicall(), the pg and pg2 modules , mnesia hidden replication, etc.
Now some 10 years later I've never ever used those functions that try to hide
the network - even though I wrote them. Interesting.

I have used rpc:call/4 extensively though but it doesn't hide the network.

/klacke








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