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Distributed systems programming has stalled

(www.shadaj.me)
287 points shadaj | 3 comments | 27 Feb 25 16:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.616s | source
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rectang ◴[27 Feb 25 16:56 UTC] No.43196141[source]▶
Ten years ago, I had lunch with Patricia Shanahan, who worked for Sun on multi-core CPUs several decades ago (before taking a post-career turn volunteering at the ASF which is where I met her). There was a striking similarity between the problems that Sun had been concerned with back then and the problems of the distributed systems that power so much the world today.

Some time has passed since then — and yet, most people still develop software using sequential programming models, thinking about concurrency occasionally.

It is a durable paradigm. There has been no revolution of the sort that the author of this post yearns for. If "Distributed Systems Programming Has Stalled", it stalled a long time ago, and perhaps for good reasons.

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1. shadaj ◴[27 Feb 25 17:04 UTC] No.43196213[source]▶
Stay tuned for the next blog post for one potential answer :) My PhD has been focused on this gap!
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2. rectang ◴[27 Feb 25 17:17 UTC] No.43196347[source]▶
As a programmer, I hope that your answer continues to abstract away the problems of concurrency from me, the way that CPU designers have managed, so that I can still think sequentially except when I need to. (And as a senior engineer, you need to — developing reliable concurrent systems is like pilots landing planes in bad weather, part of the job.)
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3. hinkley ◴[27 Feb 25 18:16 UTC] No.43196896[source]▶
I was doing some Java code recently after spending a decade in async code and boy that first few minutes was like jumping into a cold pool. Took me a moment to switch gears back to everything is blocking and that function just takes 500ms sometimes, waiting for IO.