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Urbit: A clean-slate functional OS

urbit.org

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Re: Urbit: A clean-slate functional OS

#11

Post by urbit »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #9

Hoon is a high-level language which defines itself in Nock. Its self-compiling kernel, 7000 lines of code, specifies Hoon unambiguously; there is no Hoon spec. Hoon can be classified as a pure, strict higher-order static type-inferred functional language, with co/contra/bivariance and genericity. However, Hoon does not use lambda calculus, unification, or other constructs from “PL theory.” Hoon also excels at handlin…

Have fun!

I recommend you start with the Nock tutorial:

http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-2-nock.html

The build instructions in this file are out of date, use the ones from the Arvo chapter. Also, probably the best short overview is the header comment in the Hoon compiler:

https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/hoon...

Also don't miss the video: https://vimeo.com/75312418

Re: Urbit: A clean-slate functional OS

#12

Post by urbit »

ajanuary wrote: post #10

So rather than having a lengthy standard it has lots of small non-standardized and brittle performance optimizations? I remain skeptical over whether this tradeoff is worth it.

It's fairly easy to make them non-brittle, because it's very easy to rig a testing framework to run both the hand-optimized "jet" and the pure code, and compare them.

Standardizing performance is a subtler and more interesting point. It's a fairly safe bet that anything in the kernel that needs to be is jet-propelled. Above that layer, who knows? Good old normative text may handle it.

But in general, the feeling should be like the difference between hardware GL and software GL. The developer doesn't see it and the user sees it only as fast versus slow.

Re: Urbit: A clean-slate functional OS

#16

Post by urbit »

agentultra wrote: post #14

This is really, really neat. I really like the concepts in Avro and Urbit. Particularly interesting for me is the checkpoint/replay, distributed version control, and neighbours. This is a really cool experiment!

Thanks, but Avro is someone else's cool project!

(Arvo is named for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_P%C3%A4rt.)

Re: Urbit: A clean-slate functional OS

#17

Post by urbit »

jsd1982 wrote: post #6

I was with you til you introduced the Hoon syntax. Why ruin a great concept with a shit language? WHAT IS WRONG WITH LANGUAGE DESIGNERS?! Just come up with a sane language with a sane syntax on a great platform. This is apparently asking a lot. It's not fucking rocket science.

I agree entirely! This is so much better than the typical "middlebrow dismissive" that I upvoted it...

And actually, if you don't like Hoon you can build your own language on this platform. So long as it compiles to Nock. You'll probably have to write your first compiler in Hoon, but we do have pretty decent combinator parsers. If you can swallow the syntax...

Re: Urbit: A clean-slate functional OS

#18

Post by tsax »

urbit wrote: post #8

A better link would be the front page: http://www.urbit.org/ I guess on the Internets, you never release anything - it's released for you. Please be warned, (a) the doc is incomplete, (b) if you create an Urbit ship you'll eventually have to destroy it, as we don't have continuity yet.

Lame qn but does the name Albert Jay Nock have anything to do with 'Nock'?

Re: Urbit: A clean-slate functional OS

#19

Post by nutate »

urbit wrote: post #11
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #9

Hoon is a high-level language which defines itself in Nock. Its self-compiling kernel, 7000 lines of code, specifies Hoon unambiguously; there is no Hoon spec. Hoon can be classified as a pure, strict higher-order static type-inferred functional language, with co/contra/bivariance and genericity. However, Hoon does not use lambda calculus, unification, or other constructs from “PL theory.” Hoon also excels at handlin…

Have fun! I recommend you start with the Nock tutorial: http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-2-nock.html The build instructions in this file are out of date, use the ones from the Arvo chapter. Also, probably the best short overview is the header comment in the Hoon compiler: https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/hoon... Also don't miss the video: https://vimeo.com/75312418

Oh wow.

After watching the video I'm legitimately interested in more than the language. You've got some cool ideas going on there. I'll be emailing for a 32-bit destroyer in a second.

Re: Urbit: A clean-slate functional OS

#20

Post by urbit »

tsax wrote: post #18
urbit wrote: post #8

A better link would be the front page: http://www.urbit.org/ I guess on the Internets, you never release anything - it's released for you. Please be warned, (a) the doc is incomplete, (b) if you create an Urbit ship you'll eventually have to destroy it, as we don't have continuity yet.

Lame qn but does the name Albert Jay Nock have anything to do with 'Nock'?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Jay_Nock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_at_the_Palaz_of_Hoon

Four-letter names that haven't been overexposed are hard to find. But four letters fits in a 32-bit direct atom, so the attraction is pretty irresistible.

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