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Oh hey neat, some coverage. Actually I'm right on the verge of the next big release (v0.8) which should make doing the networked programming significantly easier.

But here's some more background: I'm co-author/co-editor of the ActivityPub specification, which might give you some idea that I have some experience with trying to build networked systems. Goblins is part of the Spritely project, or even more accurately, the foundation for it: https://spritelyproject.org/

Spritely has some pretty wild ambitions... I won't go into them in detail, the video near the top of the above site explains better. But achieving those in a feasible timeframe means we need some better tooling. Goblins is the foundation of that; it's implemented as a Racket library, but can/will be ported elsewhere. The docs linked above explain some of the core ideas, but honestly I think the video linked from this section of the site explains it better: https://spritelyproject.org/#goblins

In general, people tend to realize that something interesting is happening when they see a cool shiny demo. So here are two pages that might give you an idea with some cool shiny demos:

- Demonstrating "time travel" in a space shooter game (no special code added for this other than exposing it in the GUI): https://dustycloud.org/blog/goblins-time-travel-micropreview... - "goblin-chat", which doesn't look quite as shiny but is interesting more that the code you see above is "end to end encrypted", but is written in a mere 250 lines of code for the whole protocol http://dustycloud.org/blog/spritely-goblins-v0.7-released/

What? How can the last one be only 250 lines of code? (And a mere 300 more for the GUI!) Well, that's because we're implementing a peer-to-peer distributed object programming protocol called CapTP (which includes wild things like distributed garbage collection over the network (for acyclic references), "promise pipelining", and is object capability secure). The next release will be advancing that work significantly. The Agoric organization is also implementing CapTP, but their stuff is in Javascript instead of Racket; we plan to have our CapTPs to converge. Thus it shouldn't really matter whether you write your code in Javascript or Racket, your code should be able to talk to each other.

Anyway, new release coming out soon. Hope that answers some things since the docs page might not convey what's fully interesting about it (and indeed, neither does this text, but the videos mentioned above do a better job).




Thanks for setting me off on a wonderful trail tonight! After a couple of hours of reading, I finally appreciate how useful, simple and coherent the capabilities+actors part of the story is! I particularly enjoyed the analogy/application [1] with federated social networking -- Seeing how easily they are modeled by ocaps actually makes capabilities much easier to understand! :-)

[1] https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org

[2] This talk also has a nice & simple technical perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H-Azm8tM24


That's neat; the ability to move state backwards is a powerful tool. I'm building my own language around reactivity and state management ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ ), and I'm getting to the point where I could demo replaying a board game backwards.


This looks very cool! And some of the ideas look very interesting!




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