PRE-SIP: Suspended functions and continuations

[adamw]

@lihaoyi

Yes, treating RPCs the same as normal methods can fail. In high performance or high concurrency scenarios, where the thread overhead is unacceptable. Or in high-reiability scenarios, where the novel failure modes become significant.

But to say “they all failed” is absurd. There are more people happily using Python’s requests alone than there are in the entire Scala community. Probably the majority of the world is treating RPCs like normal method calls, and it generally works reasonably well.

I think they failed as ultimately you do need to tackle the fact that an RPC call fails differently from a local call. Now this might be done with discipline (in Python) or with the help of a compiler (in Scala) - that’s a dynamic vs static typed discussion, people have different preferences, and that’s completely fine.

But there are no magic solutions which make RPC calls behave just as local calls. You need different code when doing an RPC, than when doing a local call. (note that this code might be far away from the invocation site, somehere in an error handler, but it still needs to be there).