Presentation: Tweet"Forty Years of Pretending"

Distributed systems are hard. We first got a glimpse of an easier way with 1974’s RFC 674, which introduced the Remote Procedure Call (RPC): a way to treat remote network calls as local. Unfortunately, RPC is fraught with issues, many raised immediately after RPC's introduction. Despite this, RPC hasn't died. Indeed, it's seeing a resurgence, as developers are finding appeal in writing tightly coupled server and browser code in the same language, be it Javascript or a compile-to-Javascript language. In this talk, we'll explore the concrete issues that RPC and its ilk create, as well as explore actionable alternatives.