Re: DBus IDL (Was Re: GLib plans for the next cycle)

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2009-03-02 at 22:26 +0000, Rob Taylor wrote:
> Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> > Whether or not the object is local (in-process) or not is irrelevant.
> > Whether or not the method call is sync or async is also irrelevant. It's
> > a method call, pure and simple.  DBus itself even calls them method
> > calls.  All you're doing by avoiding that in the IDL is making us learn
> > and remember yet another confusing and incompatible syntax.
> 
> Wow. No.
> 
> That was the main insanity of CORBA. Hiding that something is IPC
> results in you thinking things are working one way when in fact they're
> working completely differently and subject to a load of unexpected
> failure modes.
> 
> Other things to consider here is that hiding IPC can also result in
> hugely inefficient IPC because you end up designing a pretty API rather
> than efficient IPC.
> 
> I could rant at length here about the various benefits of CORBA vs
> message bus. But suffice to say hiding that there's a message bus means
> you end up with CORBA again and all the attendant problems.

I very very much agree. And I had to fight these CORBA problems for many
years maintaining a bonobo based application. Please learn from history
and don't fuck up our platform again.

This should be required reading for everyone that ever touches IPC:
http://research.sun.com/techrep/1994/abstract-29.html

Its as true today as it was when it was written (1994!).

This is also a nice starting point for similar ideas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Computing