(Author here) Your comment about scaling is on point. We're building on a system that not just enables but encourages a large amount of duplicated work because

(Author here) Your comment about scaling is on point. We're building on a system that not just enables but encourages a large amount of duplicated work because the substrate we've settled on is bytearray oriented. So all PLs and programs map their structures to 'bytes'. Could be worse - we could have different kinds of bytes (8-bit, 12-bit, etc.). But also could be better - the different processes could map their internal structures onto shared symbols or trees, and the substrate could provide a higher level of abstraction instead of clumps-of-bytes. The interesting question to me is what kinds of composition models should a substrate provide? If we pre-share the notion of bytes, we end up share files and writing over sockets. If we pre-share more structured notion (e.g. graph) and share that it's another way. But there's more to it - how does meaning get transmitted via a message to a receiver? If we pre-share a grammar language, perhaps we can send a message that programs the receiver to extract useful info from itself? Whatever the structure of the message, there needs to be some sharing of 'tags' or 'identifiers' within the message for it to be usefully absorbed. How do we share these? Should this also be provided by the substrate?