Hacker News Reader

Comment by kiitos | Hacker News Reader

mm, i think you're describing corba, not rpc in general

CORBA is trippier than that. A client’s request could include elements not normally serializable, like callbacks. A server could provide an object in response to your query and then continue mutating it, with the mutations reflected (effectively) in your address space, without your knowledge or participation.

That's exactly what Cap'n Web does...

I am not really sure what you're talking about

RPC is "remote procedure call", emphasis on "remote", meaning you always necessarily gonna be serializing/deserializing the information over some kind of wire, between discrete/different nodes, with discrete/distinct address spaces

a client request by definition can't include anything that can't be serialized, serialization is the ground truth requirement for any kind of RPC...

a server doesn't provide "an object" in response to a query, it provides "a response payload", which is at most a snapshot of some state it had at the time of the request, it's not as if there is any expectation that this serialized state is gonna be consistent between nodes

Nothing stops me from implementing a Thrift or gRPC handler that uses a field from the request to look up an object in a hashmap and then call one of its methods with data from the request. But a distributed object system will do this implicitly on my behalf, so that the programmer’s perspective is like passing objects (by reference) over the network.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com