[stickfigure]

> you can't address these failure modes properly.

Again, total nonsense. There's nothing special about a promise. Whatever logic you can build on promises is easier to build synchronously. Everything that applies to building distributed systems applies whether you use rpc stubs or promises. Promises are just noisier and harder to reason about.

[naasking]

Maybe we're speaking past each other. Idempotent operations are implicit promises. Network partitions require idempotency at some level to ensure robustness. That means any robust distributed protocol requires promises at the core protocol level.

Trying to hide the promises behind a synchronous client interface is unnecessarily constraining and inefficient, like requiring large stack contexts that can't be restarted or persisted, and so can't be simply resumed after partitions.