There seem to be several underlying reasons for this. One is that RPC interfaces are not readily discoverable; that is, it is difficult to query these interfaces for their capabilities, and difficult to monitor them in action without building single-use tools as complex as the programs being monitored (we examined some of the reasons for this in Chapter6). They have the same version skew problems as libraries, but those problems are harder to track because they're distributed and not generally obvious at link time.

As a related issue, interfaces that have richer type signatures also tend to be more complex, therefore more brittle. Over time, they tend to succumb to ontology creep as the inventory of types that get passed across interfaces grows steadily larger and the individual types more elaborate. Ontology creep is a problem because structs are more likely to mismatch than strings; if the ontologies of the programs on each side don't exactly match, it can be very hard to teach them to communicate at all, and fiendishly difficult to resolve bugs. The most successful RPC applications, such as the Network File System, are those in which the application domain naturally has only a few simple data types.

The usual argument for RPC is that it permits “richer” interfaces than methods like text streams — that is, interfaces with a more elaborate and application-specific ontology of data types. But the Rule of Simplicity applies! We observed in Chapter4 that one of the functions of interfaces is as choke points that prevent the implementation details of modules from leaking into each other. Therefore, the main argument in favor of RPC is also an argument that it increases global complexity rather than minimizing it.

With classical RPC, it's too easy to do things in a complicated and obscure way instead of keeping them simple. RPC seems to encourage the production of large, baroque, over-engineered systems with obfuscated interfaces, high global complexity, and serious version-skew and reliability problems — a perfect example of thick glue layers run amok.

Windows COM and DCOM are perhaps the archetypal examples of how bad this can get, but there are plenty of others. Apple abandoned OpenDoc, and both CORBA and the once wildly hyped Java RMI have receded from view in the Unix world as people have gained field experience with them. This may well be because these methods don't actually solve more problems than they cause.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Robbert van Renesse have given us a detailed analysis of the general problem in A Critique of the Remote Procedure Call Paradigm [Tanenbaum-VanRenesse], a paper which should serve as a strong cautionary note to anyone considering an architecture based on RPC.

All these problems may predict long-term difficulties for the relatively few Unix projects that use RPC. Of these projects, perhaps the best known is the GNOME desktop effort.^[77] These problems also contribute to the notorious security vulnerabilities of exposing NFS servers.

Unix tradition, on the other hand, strongly favors transparent and discoverable interfaces. This is one of the forces behind the Unix culture's continuing attachment to IPC through textual protocols. It is often argued that the parsing overhead of textual protocols is a performance problem relative to binary RPCs — but RPC interfaces tend to have latency problems that are far worse, because (a) you can't readily anticipate how much data marshaling and unmarshaling a given call will involve, and (b) the RPC model tends to encourage programmers to treat network transactions as cost-free. Adding even one additional round trip to a transaction interface tends to add enough network latency to swamp any overhead from parsing or marshaling.