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by zzz61831 2152 days ago
"The work on what eventually became C++ started with an attempt to analyze the UNIX kernel to determine to what extent it could be distributed over a network of computers connected by a local area network."

That was the only connection it had to something "distributed". In a literal meaning of the word, not distributed systems.

The problems distributed systems actually face were never addressed by C++ in any way. Something like meta facilities for implementing actor runtimes and using an actor model could be the first step, but who knows what Stroustrup was talking about, maybe it's all just marketing buzzwords useless for distributed systems, like in most languages that claim distributed systems support.

1 comments

Most of my issues with distributed came from poor over the wire interop. Very crappy libs that would serialize and deserialize in amazingly bad ways. Or some descriptor lang (like idl). Then God help you if you had two different CPU/compiler platforms on both sides. JSON has in many ways filled the niche that XML was doing and RPC before it. But I had to spend so much time writing glue code just so both sides could send/recv that data.