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0 pointsbascule13y ago0 comments

Hello, author of Celluloid here.

I think DRb pretty cool and has long been underutilized. That said, there are a few fundamental design problems with the way it works that I think DCell solves:

1. Distributed systems really need to be built on top of asynchronous protocols, and DRb is a direct mapping of a synchronous method dispatch protocol onto a distributed systems protocol. Similar attempts at this include: CORBA and SOAP. If anyone disagrees with this I can go into more detail but I think you will find ample distributed systems literature condemning synchronous protocols. DCell is fully asynchronous (but also provides synchronous calls over an underlying asynchronous protocol)

2. DRb is multithreaded but does not provide the user with any assistance in building multithreaded programs. This becomes particularly confusing when you have to deal with a proxy object (DRb::DRbObject) in a remote scenario but not in a local scenario

0 comments

robotmay13y ago

As an aside; Celluloid is awesome and you really made concurrent programming in Ruby better by releasing it :)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsbascule13y ago0 comments

Hello, author of Celluloid here.

I think DRb pretty cool and has long been underutilized. That said, there are a few fundamental design problems with the way it works that I think DCell solves: