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Hmm ... I haven't looked at Urbit in years, but this doc was pretty well written -- and it makes me curious about a Unix-y and loosely coupled version of the sy

by chubot 3y ago

Hmm ... I haven't looked at Urbit in years, but this doc was pretty well written -- and it makes me curious about a Unix-y and loosely coupled version of the system. It always seemed a big no-no to couple the VM and OS to the language. Language diversity is a good thing. What would it take to build something with the interesting properties of Urbit on a more normal, not-purposefully-obscure stack? As far as I understand, Guix has deterministically built the whole ecosystem from a 357 byte bootstrap https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/ https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-... OK so now you have, C compilers, Python, JavaScript, etc. --- Now what do you need to do to Linux? Do you need to get rid of time() and rand() ? (Not sure if Urbit is functional like that) --- What about the networking? The whole network has a single state? So is this like if you had all of these separate Linux systems all writing to one big distributed git repository or something? I never really understood how the networking is done. --- This leaves the identity parts; I would also leave out the crypto parts too ... But as far as language / OS / networking, I'm sorta interested in what a "conventional" system of this type would look like. I actually think it has some practical applications for some kind of functional distro like Guix (since these distros all become networked systems eventually -- they are not really single-machine systems) I also wonder if this already exists -- are there "non-obscure" and "non-ideological" systems like this? When you add some language diversity, it becomes more interesting to me.

davidgerard 3y ago
yeah, Urbit seems to be an uncredited crib of the original Nix paper https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/724590682207141888/so-it-turns-out-urbit-is-a-bad-crib-from-nix https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/724590682207141888/so-it...
- chubot 3y ago
  Nix was novel because it brought reproducibility, immutability, etc. to a real system running on Linux -- but if you don't have the Linux constraint, then the ideas go back MUCH further And Nix is a package manager / build system, while Urbit is more of a "distributed Lisp OS", with networking and identity Or at least, I'd like to read a post that's not so clearly driven by personal animosity :-P --- FWIW I briefly worked on Google's Bazel in ~2006, and all the Nix ideas were there, but nobody referenced Nix. They referenced Vesta (and other systems): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesta_(software_configuration_management) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesta_(software_configuration_... from 1993. Bazel is way faster and more distributed than Nix, probably because it's just had much more engineering effort behind it.
  - davidgerard 3y ago
    Urbit (also a real system running on Linux) is an obfuscated implementation of a lot of ideas going back to Lisp machines - but it seems proximately to be a Nix crib. The key point is really that Urbit is not a fount of hitherto unknown novelty, however Yarvin paints it (2010): > So we have the Urbit problem: a frozen, universal, static functional namespace. In other words: a standard static functional namespace. Perhaps we are getting further into the rocket-science department. It is not hard to write a functional namespace. But how can we standardize a functional namespace? You will search the RFC Editor's shelves in vain for anything even remotely like Urbit. http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra... As you note, this claim of novelty is nonsense. New basic computing primitives are like punk rock bands: the first few are fresh and exciting, the ten thousandth is … not. Turing machines and Lisp were new and interesting, Urbit is Yarvin’s favourite toy language. Urbit does well-understood things, badly.
    - chubot 3y ago
      To be clear, I was asking for a distillation of the novel parts of Urbit, without all the obscurantism (and I do think there is novelty; the Plunder project seems to be evidence of that) I don't agree with the post that says it's a derivative of Nix. Nix is interesting, and there are some common ideas, but it doesn't make any sense to say Urbit derives from it The 2010 post cites Arc and VPRI as other "software from scratch" efforts What other "software from scratch" efforts have extended into the realm of networking? Nix/Guix don't tackle that problem or claim to -- e.g. it doesn't make sense to write a chat app "running in" Nix/Guix because they are package managers, not OSes. The OS is Linux; the networking stack is the Internet. --- It's also an open question how self-hosted Urbit really is though ... if there's not an instantiation of it that's outside of Unix/Windows/the Internet, then I would say it falls short of "software from scratch". Also, it seems like the current dev process leans heavily on cloud software; it's not really self-hosted or self-sustaining. Is it really a computer, or is it an app running inside existing computers? The uxn system that's gotten a bunch of attention on HN is interesting because it does run on hardware, divorced from Unix/Windows - https://100r.co/site/uxn.html https://100r.co/site/uxn.html (but it also doesn't tackle networking)

by chubot 3y ago

davidgerard 3y ago

yeah, Urbit seems to be an uncredited crib of the original Nix paper https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/724590682207141888/so-it-turns-out-urbit-is-a-bad-crib-from-nix https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/724590682207141888/so-it...

chubot 3y ago
Nix was novel because it brought reproducibility, immutability, etc. to a real system running on Linux -- but if you don't have the Linux constraint, then the ideas go back MUCH further And Nix is a package manager / build system, while Urbit is more of a "distributed Lisp OS", with networking and identity Or at least, I'd like to read a post that's not so clearly driven by personal animosity :-P --- FWIW I briefly worked on Google's Bazel in ~2006, and all the Nix ideas were there, but nobody referenced Nix. They referenced Vesta (and other systems): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesta_(software_configuration_management) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesta_(software_configuration_... from 1993. Bazel is way faster and more distributed than Nix, probably because it's just had much more engineering effort behind it.
- davidgerard 3y ago
  Urbit (also a real system running on Linux) is an obfuscated implementation of a lot of ideas going back to Lisp machines - but it seems proximately to be a Nix crib. The key point is really that Urbit is not a fount of hitherto unknown novelty, however Yarvin paints it (2010): > So we have the Urbit problem: a frozen, universal, static functional namespace. In other words: a standard static functional namespace. Perhaps we are getting further into the rocket-science department. It is not hard to write a functional namespace. But how can we standardize a functional namespace? You will search the RFC Editor's shelves in vain for anything even remotely like Urbit. http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra... As you note, this claim of novelty is nonsense. New basic computing primitives are like punk rock bands: the first few are fresh and exciting, the ten thousandth is … not. Turing machines and Lisp were new and interesting, Urbit is Yarvin’s favourite toy language. Urbit does well-understood things, badly.
  - chubot 3y ago
    To be clear, I was asking for a distillation of the novel parts of Urbit, without all the obscurantism (and I do think there is novelty; the Plunder project seems to be evidence of that) I don't agree with the post that says it's a derivative of Nix. Nix is interesting, and there are some common ideas, but it doesn't make any sense to say Urbit derives from it The 2010 post cites Arc and VPRI as other "software from scratch" efforts What other "software from scratch" efforts have extended into the realm of networking? Nix/Guix don't tackle that problem or claim to -- e.g. it doesn't make sense to write a chat app "running in" Nix/Guix because they are package managers, not OSes. The OS is Linux; the networking stack is the Internet. --- It's also an open question how self-hosted Urbit really is though ... if there's not an instantiation of it that's outside of Unix/Windows/the Internet, then I would say it falls short of "software from scratch". Also, it seems like the current dev process leans heavily on cloud software; it's not really self-hosted or self-sustaining. Is it really a computer, or is it an app running inside existing computers? The uxn system that's gotten a bunch of attention on HN is interesting because it does run on hardware, divorced from Unix/Windows - https://100r.co/site/uxn.html https://100r.co/site/uxn.html (but it also doesn't tackle networking)