Urbit Meetup

The purpose of the Urbit meetup is to share information about Urbit with the Christchurch community, help people get themselves setup on the network and share tips on how to use Urbit.

Anyone who cares about owning their data, technology & exploring new ways of computing should join. Developers may also find Urbit a very interesting place to build the future of networked computing.

Our events will mainly discuss Urbit, the philosophy, whats new, how to’s as well as some technical discussion if that is of interest to the group

Urbit is a new execution stack designed from scratch. The VM is a combinator automaton, nock, defined in 200 words. A strict, typed functional language, hoon, compiles itself to nock. arvo is an event-sourced OS in hoon, designed as a personal cloud server.

While urbit still scales poorly, it’s stable enough to host a distributed chat network and serve React apps. The whole system is about 25,000 lines of code, all MIT licensed and patent-free. Since none of urbit’s layers fits well in any system-software family tree, its key disadvantage is that you need to learn to program again. It’s also pretty slow, though we think we know how to make it fast.

In exchange you get: a logical computer whose entire lifecycle is deterministic; a single-level store (“NoDB”) where every packet is a transaction; an authenticated, encrypted network with a global immutable namespace; typed functional programming without category theory; typed, exactly-once network messages; and lots of other cool stuff that anyone sensible these days would put in a system software stack if she got the chance to design one.