The execution model of local calls are quite different from remote calls. Because of these differences, many efforts have been made, but "transparent remoting" is still not achieved [1].
I agree with sentiment of the paper in that it can never be fully transparent. When I say "it should just be a process of identifying hot function calls..." this is admittedly a little contrived - there would need to be a more thorough analysis.
The main point seems to be that partial failure is too difficult to handle without explicitly declaring some objects as "remote".
> Merging the models by making local computing follow the model of distributed computing would require major changes in implementation languages (or in how those languages are used) and make local computing far more complex than is otherwise necessary
Given that the paper is from 1994, I'm wondering if there have been language changes that make this more achievable.
What comes to mind is the event loop. The fact that in Node.js, almost every function call is now an asynchronous promise due to the non-blocking paradigm coupled with the convenience of async/await syntax. These event loop runtimes provide a universal way to hook into asynchronous calls.
I would imagine that in 1994, envisioning the code added to the languages of the day needed to handle timeout and asynchronous invocations would have felt overwhelming.
Also thinking about ORMs and databases. It seems TOPLink for SmallTalk was the first, released in 1995 after this paper was. ORMs seem kind of like "transparent remoting", as they usually can run against an in-memory database or db on a local system, or over an TCP connection, which then needs to deal with latency and failure. And for any app talking to a DB with an ORM, means that the failure cases of the ORM must prevade throughout the stack.
> Given that the paper is from 1994, I'm wondering if there have been language changes that make this more achievable.
As the paper argues, it is not possible to make remote calls look like local ones. But it is trivially possible to make local calls look like remote ones! Use call-by-value parameter passing, and make all call asynchronous. The most successful solution I have heard of is Erlang's immutable-message-passing model.
It has been many years since I used it, but I think TOPLink Session and UnitOfWork interfaces threw exceptions signaling remote execution. This is like Erlang - you work with remote APIs; local execution is a special case.
The main thing is that regardless of scaling, the app should always be able to run/debug/test locally in a monolithic thing.
Once people scale they seem to abandon the need to debug locally at their peril.
Scaling should just be a process of identifying hot function calls and when a flag is set, to execute a call as a network rpc instead.