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Not CORBA - RPC preceded it by at least a decade (at least on Unix and possibly VMS). You defined an interface using a description language (XDR) which general

Not CORBA - RPC preceded it by at least a decade (at least on Unix and possibly VMS). You defined an interface using a description language (XDR) which generally produced both client and server code. edit: there was also a utility "rpcgen" that automated a lot of stuff. Sun RPC was (at least I think) the most popular version of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_RPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_RPC The generated code looked after all the marshalling/unmarshalling of your types, did the connection handshaking etc. You had to have a service running on your Unix machine (rpc.bind?). NFS used to use XDR and some variant of RPC to work but I am not sure it does any more.

boulos 5y ago
> NFS used to use XDR and some variant of RPC to work but I am not sure it does any more. Yep, still does [1]. Even 4.1 and 4.2 (the most modern variants of NFS) all start with .x files and XDR encoding. The ancient names codified by Sun still exist and still work (and the tooling still works for introspection as a nice bonus). [1] https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha/tree/next/src/Protocols/XDR https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha/tree/next/src/Pro...
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  I guess the whole Sun set of tools was built on RPC: All the yellow pages stuff, automounting your home directory etc. Never really thought about it too hard when I was a Sun administrator back in the 1990s. If somebody gave me a choice of CORBA or Sun RPC, I'd still pick Sun RPC. CORBA was a nightmare.