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21 years and counting of 'eight fallacies of distributed computing' (2025)

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Re: 21 years and counting of 'eight fallacies of distributed computing' (2025)

#51

Post by gf000 »

inigyou wrote: post #26
zephen wrote: post #3

On the one hand, the list isn't wrong. On the other hand, more fortunes have been made by assuming that physics will catch up (closely enough, anyway) to computational needs, than by assuming that every byte and every cycle and every nanosecond matters.

In 2026 Moore's law has mostly stopped. My computer from 10 years ago still has acceptable performance today. My computer from 15 years ago would struggle a bit but still get the job done. This is nothing like the 90s where you actually could wait two years for all of that year's conceivable performance problems to be solved.

Dennard scaling has stopped (performance/clock speed increasing), Moore's law means mostly transistor count or density. The former is still going strong, the latter is slowing down.

Re: 21 years and counting of 'eight fallacies of distributed computing' (2025)

#52

Post by IAmBroom »

rusk wrote: post #32
inigyou wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is every business a stock market and commercial Telecomm?

> Making money and being highly available are different goals. These are large, highly profitable vertical markets. The above remark is demonstrably foolish and ignorant.

OK, fine:

Making money and being highly available often different goals.

Re: 21 years and counting of 'eight fallacies of distributed computing' (2025)

#53

Post by rusk »

IAmBroom wrote: post #52
rusk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Making money and being highly available are different goals. These are large, highly profitable vertical markets. The above remark is demonstrably foolish and ignorant.

OK, fine: Making money and being highly available often different goals.

Not if being highly available is central to your business model which is about half the industry

Re: 21 years and counting of 'eight fallacies of distributed computing' (2025)

#54

Post by zephen »

RetroTechie wrote: post #33
zephen wrote: post #3

On the one hand, the list isn't wrong. On the other hand, more fortunes have been made by assuming that physics will catch up (closely enough, anyway) to computational needs, than by assuming that every byte and every cycle and every nanosecond matters.

That's like saying money is only spent on sw/hw systems which rely on ever-growing compute capacity. Reality: embedded systems are a thing. And there's (lots of!) money in that business too. There's maaaany applications where some (fixed) amount of compute does the job, and the simplest/cheapest device that does it wins out.

> Reality: embedded systems are a thing.

I've worked in embedded, and chips, and embedded chips for most of my career.

> There's maaaany applications where some (fixed) amount of compute does the job, and the simplest/cheapest device that does it wins out.

There's usually quite a bit factored in for slop in these days, because time-to-market is a thing. There's also sometimes a cost-reduction stage (yeah, I've been involved in cost reductions where a penny a unit was awesome), but you don't bother doing the cost-reduction phase unless you have the volume to support it.

Warren Buffet famously said that "Concentration builds wealth, diversification preserves it."

In much of computing, even embedded, demos and prototypes build a product, and the right-sizing of everything to make it even more profitable happens later, if it is worth it.

Re: 21 years and counting of 'eight fallacies of distributed computing' (2025)

#56

Post by bigiain »

adornKey wrote: post #16
jffhn wrote: post #12

Also, the four fallacies of local computing: - The CPU is infinitely fast. - RAM is infinite. - CPU caches don't exist. - Cache lines don't exist.

Today even tiny CPUs are really fast. Locally you have to mess up badly to run into trouble. But of course people will do exactly that... Most real world problems still can be solved with 32-bit software, so the last ~20 years running out of RAM always counted as "using defective hardware". AI workloads now make things interesting again, but it's not that easy to hit the ceiling with real world workload. Cache is ind…

I think there's a very different perspective on this between people old enough to have written assembly for 8 bit cpus like 6502 or Z80 often with well under 64kb of total system memory - compared to people who grew up in the age where the "starting coding" choices were something like "Angular or React?" and each browser tab could consume a GB or two of memory.

I'm not trying to say "greybeards are better" or "younger developers don't understand fundamentals" - it's more that the learned/ingrained abstractions those two types of developers start from are very very different. People who were familiar with concepts like the 6502's zero page where you get faster performance because you can use 8 bit addressing to access the first 256 _bytes_ of memory, end up with different mental tools and thinking than, say, people who started out their development learning about asynchronous callbacks and promises. One isn't better or worse than the other - but they are very very different.

(Even today's "tiny" CPUs are commonly 32 bit multi core SOCs. ESP32 kinda took over what used to be done with 8bit atmel Arduino class CPUs)

Re: 21 years and counting of 'eight fallacies of distributed computing' (2025)

#57

Post by inigyou »

rusk wrote: post #48
inigyou wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more interesting thing on Windows would actually be COM, which is something like Java interfaces but for native code, that are optionally cross-process.

In my recollection COM became ActiveX which fell down the distributed objects hole along with CORBA because it embodied many of these fallacies.

COM still exists. That is like saying Java fell down the Spring framework rabbit hole. It did, but you can still use Java without using Spring.

Re: 21 years and counting of 'eight fallacies of distributed computing' (2025)

#58

Post by rusk »

inigyou wrote: post #57
rusk wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my recollection COM became ActiveX which fell down the distributed objects hole along with CORBA because it embodied many of these fallacies.

COM still exists. That is like saying Java fell down the Spring framework rabbit hole. It did, but you can still use Java without using Spring.

It still exists? Like Java still exists

Re: 21 years and counting of 'eight fallacies of distributed computing' (2025)

#59

Post by inigyou »

rusk wrote: post #58
inigyou wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COM still exists. That is like saying Java fell down the Spring framework rabbit hole. It did, but you can still use Java without using Spring.

It still exists? Like Java still exists

It still exists and it's used by windows APIs, even recently designed ones
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