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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: 0.294s | 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. jimbokun ◴[27 Feb 25 19:37 UTC] No.43197661[source]▶
The author critiques having sequential code executing on individual nodes, uninformed by the larger distributed algorithm in which they play a part.

However, I think there are great advantages to that style. It’s easier to analyze and test the sequential code for correctness. Then it writes a Kafka message or makes an HTTP call and doesn’t need to be concerned with whatever is handling the next step in the process.

Then assembling the sequential components once they are all working individually is a much simpler task.