From ... Path: supernews.google.com!sn-xit-02!sn-xit-03!supernews.com!news.tele.dk!129.240.148.23!uio.no!Norway.EU.net!127.0.0.1!nobody From: Erik Naggum Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: corba or sockets? Date: 30 Oct 2000 13:22:04 +0000 Organization: Naggum Software; vox: +47 800 35477; gsm: +47 93 256 360; fax: +47 93 270 868; http://naggum.no; http://naggum.net Lines: 42 Message-ID: <3181900924130896@naggum.net> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: oslo-nntp.eunet.no 972912130 12249 195.0.192.66 (30 Oct 2000 13:22:10 GMT) X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@eunet.no NNTP-Posting-Date: 30 Oct 2000 13:22:10 GMT mail-copies-to: never User-Agent: Gnus/5.0803 (Gnus v5.8.3) Emacs/20.7 Xref: supernews.google.com comp.lang.lisp:2891 * Philip Lijnzaad | Unless the communication involves simple but big data (kind of like ftp, | say), use CORBA, by a very long shot. Really? I'd use CORBA for fairly simple stuff and roll my own if I get above a fairly low complexity threshold, but I know I'm about three orders of magnitude better at protocol design than the CORBA team could ever dream of becoming. For instance, CORBA is a single- threaded protocol, with lock-step properties where you wait for the answer before you continue with the next transaction. This is of course a consequence of serial computations and CORBA being a very, very slow way of doing serial computations on disjoint processes and processors. With all this hoopla about multi-threading and other uses for real and pseudo-parallelism, you might expect people to think through the multi-threading implications of their protocols. The hardware folks are gung-ho about _real_ parallelism, trying very hard to answer the demand for faster on-chip communication, but then what do we get in the software world? People who use all this new hardware power only to wait for ages for incoming data before they turn around _real_ fast to send something that did not even need to wait for that value and then proceed to wait for ages, again, only because the protocol is designed by a committee of morons? If you cannot deal with multiple objects "on the wire" and are not using the bandwidth at full throttle even while you _are_ waiting for something to come in, you are not programming in the dynamic, networked world of the new millennium. (How's that for buzzwords?) E.g, how many applications do you know which continue to work just as well if you move one of the computers 3000 miles away? Do you think CORBA handles this situation well? From what I have seen, the application grinds to a virtual stand-still. Latencies higher than a few millisecond cause all sorts of interesting behavior in modern software. It's pretty pathetic that such things are touted as workable solutions. #:Erik -- Does anyone remember where I parked Air Force One? -- George W. Bush