Resourceful Code Reuse

Getting a Taste of Remote Procedure Calls

Remember the function read_json that you called over and over again directly and in different disguises? In this section, read_json is a part of another program on another computer, and you’ll still be able to call it. Welcome to the fantastic world of remote procedure calls. (By the way, for the rest of this book, assume that “procedure” is a synonym of “function.”)

Remote procedure calls take at most one parameter.

Remote procedure calls are fundamentally different from local procedure calls in two ways. First, the caller and the callee communicate via a network (typically, a UDP/IP network). Second, they don’t share the address space. The first difference limits the size of the parameter and return ...