Building a distributed architecture is so much more than what’s presented here: error handling, consistency management, data plane, control plane, name services… this feels like it’s taking 2% of what Erlang offers out of the box and calling it done.
This article appears to be focused on running many components on a single computer under the same process tree. Perhaps a better title would be "No more DSLs: Implement and deploy microservices as a monolith".
>Functionality for distributed execution and monitoring is shared through libraries rather than by delegating to external orchestration systems, making a single-program system completely self-contained.
and this section in the examples: http://catern.com/caternetes.html#thread
With the emphasis on distributed systems, I was waiting to see how the approach would help synchronization, replication, network dependencies, etc. But all the examples show calling other services as functions or spawning new processes. At the end orderd starts listening for requests, but I don't see any example in the article where the example program talks to another computer in the system. Perhaps I am missing something?
Anyway there is overlap between the two terms so strictly speaking the author is not wrong. But is anything with threads a distributed system? If so I built many of them, even with Python .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrency_(computer_science)
Also, as other have said, the author's definition of "distributed system" (here, basically a "multithreaded" , concurrent system) seems to clash with the conventional definition (a system that has to involve multiple _computers_)
It is true that there is some overlap (having concurrency forces you to handle "some" of the problems with functional part of your program not being collocated on the same stack, you kinda have to introduce callbacks / promise / futures / actors / etc...)
But the moment you really have different programs o two machines (or , worse, two replicas of the same peogram on two machines), then I don't see how the single program would work / help.
Unless, of course, the "single program" is meant to be run as "one of the replica of the full system" ? Then I would love to hear the author's strategy for handling sharing info and workload between the replicas.
What gives you that impression? The article talks multiple times about using libraries to manage distributed execution, and shows those libraries in use.
[1] boinc.berkeley.edu
- BOINC looks like an interface for end-users to volunteer compute resources for various (existing) distributed-computing projects.
- Post is about building your own distributed system starting from minimal-yet-effective principles.
