That idea crossed my mind, too - in fact, I have a SOPINE cluster here [1] (built by Pine64) that would be a good platform for experiments with distributed objects. The Turing Pi is a very similar product for Raspberry Pi Compute Modules [2], just a bit more expensive. Of course, this approach would work as well with a bunch of Raspberry Pis connected via an Ethernet switch.

There was some research in the late '80s on building a distributed Smalltalk [3,4] which is a nice inspiration for such a project. So it's definitely possible to build a distributed Smalltalk and it would be interesting to investigate how well such a system would work given today's hardware performance and networking throughput.

Distributed Smalltalk is just one of the ideas for building distributed non-shared-memory systems from the 1980s. This was an interesting time in general, people experimented with different approaches for distributed systems hardware and software. Some examples include the inmos Transputer, which had bit-serial communication links [5] and support for CSP-based (paper [6] and book [7]) communication in the instruction set (later these ideas were picked up again by David May and his colleagues for the XMOS embedded processors [8]); on the operating system side there were systems such as Plan 9 and Inferno [9], invented by the Unix team at Bell labs, Tanenbaum's (the Minix guy) Amoeba [10] and Ousterhout's (otherwise known for tcl/tk) Sprite [11].

Some of these ideas seem to be gaining popularity again (e.g., CSP-based communication for goroutines [12]) and I hope my students here are interested in investigation these approaches to building distributed systems, e.g. as an alternative platform for IoT applications.

(edit: links reformatted)

[1] https://www.pine64.org/clusterboard/

[2] https://turingpi.com/

[3] Marcel Schelvis, Eddy Bledoeg, The Implementation of a Distributed Smalltalk, ECOOP 1988 - www.lirmm.fr/~ducour/Doc-objets/ECOOP/papers/0322/03220212.pdf

[4] John K. Bennett. 1987. The design and implementation of distributed Smalltalk. SIGPLAN Not. 22, 12 - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.61....

[5] http://www.transputer.net/

[6] Hoare, C. A. R. (1978). "Communicating sequential processes". Communications of the ACM. 21 (8): 666–677 - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Hoare78.pdf

[7] Hoare, C. A. R. (1985). Communicating Sequential Processes. Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-153289-2 - http://www.usingcsp.com/

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMOS

[9] Pike, R.; Presotto, D.; Dorward, S.; Flandrena, B.; Thompson, K.; Trickey, H.; Winterbottom, P. "Plan 9 from Bell Labs". Bell Labs Technical Report - https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2014/papers/plan9.pdf

[10] Andrew S. Tanenbaum, M. Frans Kaashoek, Robbert van Renesse and Henri E. Bal (1991). The Amoeba distributed operating system — a status report. Computer Communications 14 - https://www.cs.vu.nl/pub/amoeba/Intro.pdf

[11] Ousterhout, John (1992). "Sprite Retrospective". University of California at Berkeley - https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/sprite/r...

[12] James Whitney, Chandler Gifford and Maria Pantoja, Distributed execution of communicating sequential process-style concurrency: Golang case study, The Journal of Supercomputing volume 75, pages 1396–1409(2019)