> The argument here is that the reason CORBA failed is because it lacked the language-level concepts to make it work well, in particular strong asynchronous programming primitives and promise pipelining.

i'm honestly not sure how to respond to this

CORBA failed because it didn't understand or accommodate the fundamental constraints of distributed computation. specifically the idea that you could define a useful abstraction of an object that worked the same way whether the implementation was local or remote. this is a protocol/design level error, nothing to do with any language-level concept, like async primitives or promise pipelining or whatever. i'm not sure how those things even entered the discussion? and i'm not trying to be glib, i'm really just re-iterating basic "lessons from CORBA 101" type stuff, which I've understood as common knowledge since the mid 90's...