Urbit interests me because it is the only tech project ever made that has simplicity as part of the core design. Over time, it will only get more simple as well.
It’s just a fundamentally different ethos from anything else out there. Difficult to compare
I guess complexity was the wrong word, because you're right, every layer is very simple. Maybe complicated? But the thing that really turned me off was not knowing if the purely functional paradigm could remain performant at a low level. Evidently not, because they bail out to C code as an optimization. Like any foundationalist paradigm, if a single stone crumbles it casts the rest of the project into doubt.
"the pure function" always comes at the cost of infinite copying of data
just watch a haskell compilation sometimes with a system monitor open to see just how much memory it uses (and then discards)
this is why #golang uses a lot of functional concepts but discards forcing you to avoid pointers, and it's a delicate compromise because pure functions are without race conditions and this is another goal of Go - enabling concurrent processing
for good reason if certain operations happen concurrently on a single piece of data the go runtime kills everything and i am glad they make it that way because races are the most elusive bugs there is
Urbit is a totally new Operating System. So naturally, it will be one step forward, two steps back in terms of performance.
Having said that though:
- Nock can be run on bare metal. The only reason we use C today is bc it’s not running on bare metal. So they don’t “bail out” to C for performance, they just use C as the translation from Nock to machine code if that makes sense. https://x.com/rovnys/status/1766183255097905157?s=46
- They have recently achieved 1 GB / second read speeds of data https://x.com/hastuc_dibtux/status/1765075518637154374?s=46
A stone crumbling is not possible in this project because of the way it was designed. They designed the whole system together as a whole and then worried about performance later. Over time, one team has found a slightly more performant way to design the system, but they are still following the same design. It’s called Plunder. https://x.com/sol_plunder/status/1704554384930058537?s=46
The ethos comment is key. Hard to describe but Urbit is a calmer place to be. Feels more human friendly. Made because things are harder there it’s built in proof of work? It’s a long term project and worthy of the effort. It’s a plant trees for the next generation situation.
*maybe (oh you can delete are fix spelling errors there to….lol)
