Hacker News Reader

Comment by pixie_ | Hacker News Reader

What's funny is that most consumers of REST APIs do it through a wrapper that turns it back into a statically typed RPC. REST truly is a useless middleman that no one realizes they just don't need.

View on HN

I doubt that most consumers of REST APIs are doing anything statically typed. I would guess that the vast majority of REST consumers are written in browser javascript. Server side, I bet at least half are written in a dynamic language.

I don't think the parent here is talking about whether the language is static/dynamic. The point is that most REST calls are wrapped in a statically 'dispatched' function call.

So in most cases you'd do something like:

    let foo = () => http.GET('/foo');
    .
    .
    .
    foo() //foo is statically dispatched in the source code here

It seems like "RPC" is being used pretty loosely in this thread. Whether foo in your example is RPC or not depends on its signature, if it attempts to synchronously return the response from the server, then it is RPC, if it just returns a Promise then it isn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com