Is Remote Evaluation a realistic alternative to Remote Procedure Call in a portable distributed application ?

There are a number of distributed applications that use the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) paradigm to invoke remote tasks. When a large number of tasks are invoked, the performance of a distributed application may become unacceptably slow. This paper investigates whether or not a paradigm known as Remote Evaluation can be used as a replacement for RPC when the number of remote tasks invocations is high, and also when there are few tasks. This paper evaluates ways in which portable distributed applications can be written by utilizing standard interfaces in a selection of programming languages, on a variety of platforms. The interfaces are described in detail, and their performance is compared. This paper is targeted at application developers who wish to consider an alternative to RPC. Declaration I declare that this dissertation represents my own work except where otherwise stated.