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Distributed systems programming has stalled

(www.shadaj.me)
287 points shadaj | 1 comments | 27 Feb 25 16:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.214s | 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. bigmutant ◴[27 Feb 25 19:02 UTC] No.43197344[source]▶
The fundamental problems are communication lag and lack of information about why issues occur (encapsulated by the Byzantine Generals problem). I like to imagine trying to build a fault-tolerant, reliable system for the Solar System. Would the techniques we use today (retries, timeouts, etc) really be adequate given that lag is upwards of hours instead of milliseconds? But that's the crux of these systems, coordination (mostly) works because systems are close together (same board, at most same DC)