Re:Your computer is a distributed system
by zozbot234 on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @09:34PM
(#30862913)
The latency involved in communicating with a separate machine is comparable to loading data from disk. So yes, it is slow, but not so slow that you couldn't reuse many of the abstractions involved in programming a single machine.
IMO there are two things that make the current abstraction of a computer as a unit make sense:
- You (mostly) don't have to try to handle partial failures within a computer. Partial failures are what make distributed systems hard.
- The difference in communication costs between two cores in a single machine is several orders of magnitude lower than communicating with a separate machine using commodity technologies. So while yes, "it's all just distributed" and you can use a common abstraction, a large enough constant factor difference means that you still will have to look through the abstraction to build a performant system.