We are pleased to announce that we have published a new Scheme Primer! (PDF) (source) We primarily wrote this for the benefit of people approaching Spritely's technology who were unfamiliar with Scheme, but since the lack of a good Scheme introductory document is a common complaint, we hope this is a useful contribution in general and a gift to the wider programming language community.
We now have a rough draft of our whitepaper, The Heart of Spritely: Distributed Objects and Capability Security! (PDF) (ODT) (ORG)
Spritely Institute CTO Christine Lemmer-Webber just released part one of a podcast interview with Mark S. Miller! In it they chart the history of secure capability programming by discussing the development of the E programming language, the variations in attitudes toward technology over time, actor behavior, and asynchronous communication.
Spritely Networked Communities Institute received its 501(c)(3) approval letter today. What does this mean? We are now a tax-exempt nonprofit in the United States!
This blogpost is based on Jessica's work being fudned by NLNet / NGI Zero. We are grateful for the support of this work!
Spritely Networked Communities Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public benefit corporation attempting to re-decentralize community on the internet.
Foreward by Christine Lemmer-Webber: Jessica wrote this blogpost within the second week of her working full time as part of Spritely but it took me a while to review it and get it up here. While object-capability based banks are not new (Spritely Goblins ships with a simple example mint based on the Capability-based Financial Instruments paper), these systems have traditionally been shown as examples where we need support for local synchronous operations to keep things simple and understandable. With no prior background in the object capability security community or in previous cryptographic banking systems, Jessica quickly refuted this claim and came up with this example alternative purely-asynchronous object-capability-based bank design. Suffice to say, this is an astounding feat and yet another demonstration of how fortunate we feel to have Jessica join the Spritely team!
The paper Content Addressed Descriptors and Interfaces with Spritely Goblins is now available for reading. (Also available: source and examples, as well as PDF and ODT versions.) It is somewhat of a wide-ranging paper in its explored ideas, but the general basis is how to perform "conversational" programming in Spritely Goblins, or any other system which assumes a mutually suspicious network. There are some other interesting ideas in there, including Goblins' ward/incanter system (a way of installing hidden behavior which requires hidden access, and then a capability to gain and apply such access).
We are happy to announce the release of Goblins v0.8! Goblins is a distributed actor model system with localized transactions layered on top of Racket. See the documentation for usage, and the ChangeLog for what's changed in this release!