4 ms·

Goblins: Distributed, Transactional Programming with Racket and Guile

128 points by alhazrod 9mo ago

backronymn 9mo ago
Spritely develops very interesting, high-level software.
Kinrany 9mo ago
Feels like there's a protocol missing: one that can be used by all parts of a persistent computing system without constraining the system as a whole
- PuercoPop 9mo ago
  The protocol is OCapN http://ocapn.org/ http://ocapn.org/
  - davexunit 9mo ago
    That's right! We are developing our own stack at Spritely but OCapN is a protocol to be implemented for any and all programming languages so we can have interoperable capability security over the network. Besides our Scheme implementation, there are JavaScript and Dart implementations in active development currently with hopefully many more to follow.
NeutralForest 9mo ago
They also have a scheme to webassembly transpiler called Hoot. They do crazy interesting work!
- davexunit 9mo ago
  Yeah those interested in Wasm topics might find https://spritely.institute/hoot/ https://spritely.institute/hoot/ interesting. It's not only a Scheme compiler but a full Wasm toolchain available as a library.
kayo_20211030 9mo ago
Interesting. I looked through the docs and couldn't find an FAQ or anything that would answer my question of why Spritely decided to develop Goblins. Is there a doc for that? What's its differentiation from something like Erlang, or is it just me missing the point, and comparing apples with bicycles?
- davexunit 9mo ago
  We should have a FAQ! We get the Erlang question a lot. In short, Erlang actors are not capabilities because processes can be enumerated in Erlang. Capabilities require that the actors/processes have unforgeable/unguessable private addresses.
  - kayo_20211030 9mo ago
    Thanks. That was helpful.
- anentropic 9mo ago
  I still don't really understand what it's for, despite that it sounds interesting and gets linked here from time to time but I think the difference is the "distributed" part, where I think they mean distributed over untrusted networks as opposed to distributed over nodes in a private cluster
mccoyb 9mo ago
How does this model compare to the syndicated actor model of Tony Garnock-Jones? (which, as far as I can tell, also supports capabilities and caveats for security) Neat work!
- davexunit 9mo ago
  The animation on the Syndicated Actors home page [0] does a pretty good job of showing the difference, I think. Goblins is much more similar to the classic actor model shown at the beginning of the animation. The "syndicated" part, as far as I understand, relates to things like eventually consistent state sync being built-in as primitives. In Goblins, we provide the actor model (actually the vat model [1] like the E language) which can be used to build eventually consistent constructs on top. Recently we prototyped this using multi-user chat as a familiar example. [2] [0] https://syndicate-lang.org/ https://syndicate-lang.org/ [1] https://files.spritely.institute/docs/guile-goblins/0.17.0/The-_0060_0060vat-model_0027_0027-of-computation.html https://files.spritely.institute/docs/guile-goblins/0.17.0/T... [2] https://spritely.institute/news/composing-capability-security-and-conflict-free-replicated-data-types.html https://spritely.institute/news/composing-capability-securit...
  - mccoyb 9mo ago
    Thank you, very helpful!
- mccoyb 9mo ago
  My 5 minute read is that the divergences are primarily in the communication model and in transactions: - the SAM coordinates through the dataspace, whereas Goblins is focused on ("point-to-point") message passing - SAM (as presented) doesn't contain a transactional semantics -- e.g. turns are atomic, and there's no rollback mechanism (I haven't been up to speed on recent work, I do wonder if this could be designed into SAM)
plagiarist 9mo ago
> Could dataspaces be a suitable system layer foundation, perhaps replacing software like systemd and D-Bus? The animation and this statement with clear practical usage got me interested. Is there active work going on in this area? I'd like to see how that interacts.
- kwk1 9mo ago
  Yep! Shepherd × Goblins https://spritely.institute/news/shepherd-goblins-update.html https://spritely.institute/news/shepherd-goblins-update.html https://shepherding.services/ https://shepherding.services/
ryukafalz 9mo ago
I've been an excited user of Goblins for several years now. So far only outside of $dayjob, which has limited the amount of time I've been able to spend with it, but it's very fun to work with if you like the actor model. I think my brain naturally wants to think about things in terms of sending messages between smaller components of a program, so Goblins fits the way I think very well. It's also what introduced me to object-capability security, which is a lot more brain-bendy when you're first trying to understand it, but after a lot of reading and playing with Goblins I find myself wishing many more things used ocaps. :)

128 points by alhazrod 9mo ago

Spritely develops very interesting, high-level software.

Feels like there's a protocol missing: one that can be used by all parts of a persistent computing system without constraining the system as a whole

PuercoPop 9mo ago
The protocol is OCapN http://ocapn.org/ http://ocapn.org/
- davexunit 9mo ago
  That's right! We are developing our own stack at Spritely but OCapN is a protocol to be implemented for any and all programming languages so we can have interoperable capability security over the network. Besides our Scheme implementation, there are JavaScript and Dart implementations in active development currently with hopefully many more to follow.

NeutralForest 9mo ago

They also have a scheme to webassembly transpiler called Hoot. They do crazy interesting work!

davexunit 9mo ago
Yeah those interested in Wasm topics might find https://spritely.institute/hoot/ https://spritely.institute/hoot/ interesting. It's not only a Scheme compiler but a full Wasm toolchain available as a library.

kayo_20211030 9mo ago

Interesting. I looked through the docs and couldn't find an FAQ or anything that would answer my question of why Spritely decided to develop Goblins. Is there a doc for that? What's its differentiation from something like Erlang, or is it just me missing the point, and comparing apples with bicycles?

davexunit 9mo ago
We should have a FAQ! We get the Erlang question a lot. In short, Erlang actors are not capabilities because processes can be enumerated in Erlang. Capabilities require that the actors/processes have unforgeable/unguessable private addresses.
- kayo_20211030 9mo ago
  Thanks. That was helpful.
anentropic 9mo ago
I still don't really understand what it's for, despite that it sounds interesting and gets linked here from time to time but I think the difference is the "distributed" part, where I think they mean distributed over untrusted networks as opposed to distributed over nodes in a private cluster

mccoyb 9mo ago

How does this model compare to the syndicated actor model of Tony Garnock-Jones? (which, as far as I can tell, also supports capabilities and caveats for security) Neat work!

davexunit 9mo ago
The animation on the Syndicated Actors home page [0] does a pretty good job of showing the difference, I think. Goblins is much more similar to the classic actor model shown at the beginning of the animation. The "syndicated" part, as far as I understand, relates to things like eventually consistent state sync being built-in as primitives. In Goblins, we provide the actor model (actually the vat model [1] like the E language) which can be used to build eventually consistent constructs on top. Recently we prototyped this using multi-user chat as a familiar example. [2] [0] https://syndicate-lang.org/ https://syndicate-lang.org/ [1] https://files.spritely.institute/docs/guile-goblins/0.17.0/The-_0060_0060vat-model_0027_0027-of-computation.html https://files.spritely.institute/docs/guile-goblins/0.17.0/T... [2] https://spritely.institute/news/composing-capability-security-and-conflict-free-replicated-data-types.html https://spritely.institute/news/composing-capability-securit...
- mccoyb 9mo ago
  Thank you, very helpful!
mccoyb 9mo ago
My 5 minute read is that the divergences are primarily in the communication model and in transactions: - the SAM coordinates through the dataspace, whereas Goblins is focused on ("point-to-point") message passing - SAM (as presented) doesn't contain a transactional semantics -- e.g. turns are atomic, and there's no rollback mechanism (I haven't been up to speed on recent work, I do wonder if this could be designed into SAM)

plagiarist 9mo ago

> Could dataspaces be a suitable system layer foundation, perhaps replacing software like systemd and D-Bus? The animation and this statement with clear practical usage got me interested. Is there active work going on in this area? I'd like to see how that interacts.

kwk1 9mo ago
Yep! Shepherd × Goblins https://spritely.institute/news/shepherd-goblins-update.html https://spritely.institute/news/shepherd-goblins-update.html https://shepherding.services/ https://shepherding.services/

ryukafalz 9mo ago

I've been an excited user of Goblins for several years now. So far only outside of $dayjob, which has limited the amount of time I've been able to spend with it, but it's very fun to work with if you like the actor model. I think my brain naturally wants to think about things in terms of sending messages between smaller components of a program, so Goblins fits the way I think very well. It's also what introduced me to object-capability security, which is a lot more brain-bendy when you're first trying to understand it, but after a lot of reading and playing with Goblins I find myself wishing many more things used ocaps. :)