[Info-vax] Reinventing VMS logical names (Fuchsia & Win NT)

[Dan Cross]

In article <uj5n1i$2cg8e$1 at dont-email.me>,
Arne Vajhøj  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>On 11/16/2023 1:18 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>> In article <uj5en8$2b2rf$1 at dont-email.me>,
>> Arne Vajhøj  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>> In article <3c044c90-ddb9-40ea-9e12-7c71279cd547n at googlegroups.com>,
>>> Jake Hamby (Solid State Jake) <jake.hamby at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>   On Thursday, November 9, 2023 at 12:40:38 PM UTC-8, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>>>> DEC did a whole lot of work on DCE.
>>>>>
>>>>> OpenVMS itself never particularly incorporated DCE within, but DCE was
>>>>> what DEC was both pushing internally and externally back at the time.
>>>>>
>>>>> Microsoft picked up DCE and ran with it, via the related COM/DCOM/OLE
>>>>> stuff, and all of what was built upon that.
>>>
>>>> DCE was a nice idea but it really lost out in the court of
>>>> public opinion for being expensive, promoted by "dinosaur"
>>>> companies, and not being OO, in contrast to CORBA, which had
>>>> its own problems, but was popular enough to get incorporated
>>>> into the standard Java libraries until it was finally only
>>>> recently dropped.
>>>
>>> Is DCE RPC less OO than CORBA?
>>>
>>> DCE RPC use IDL. And it seems perfectly OO to me. A client can
>>> be written in C but so can clients for CORBA. Just cumbersome.
>> 
>> Sun ONC RPC uses an IDL too.  Would you call that "Object
>> Oriented"?  If so, what does that term even mean?
>
>I don't know Sun ONC RPC IDL.

It is easy enough to look it up.  Same with DCE RPC, for that
matter.

>But if it is an abstract definition of an interface defining
>the methods that an object implementation has to implement,
>then it object oriented.

That is too abstract to have meaning.  For instance, how does
one define "object" in this context?  If I have a data structure
represented as, say, a global array of machine words, and I
expose a bunch of methods to manipulate that array via an RPC
interface, is that "object oriented"?  I don't think many
serious programmers would argue that it is.  Certainly, I don't
think anyone would seriously describe either ONC or DCE RPC as
"object oriented" even if things like MSFT's RPC is derived from
the latter, and either _can_ be used to implement OO-style
distributed systems.  But that's sort of like asserting that a
function call is OO because OO languages make function calls.

>>> Clean (as in "out of the box from OSF") DCE RPC may never have caught
>>> on, but DCOM that is based on DCE RPC is on every Windows system
>>> out there.
>> 
>> The RPC protocol was just one component of DCE.  There was also
>> the time service, authentication service, name service, and
>> filesystem.
>
>Time, auth and name services are supporting services for the
>application framework.
>
>File system seems weird. And I don't think any of the similar
>technologies had such.

Sun's NFS is an RPC service, and CMU/Transarc/IBM used the `rx`
RPC interface in its implementation.

	- Dan C.