In my last post I talked about launching the Spritely project in all its ambitiousness. As I said, I plan on releasing it as a series of "demos". What I mean by "demo" is fairly loose: things you can try and see, artifacts to indicate progress as I go. Convergence slowly towards a goal.

Over the last week I released the first version of the foundation of this work, which I'm calling Goblins. v0.1, a pre-pre-alpha release, is now out the door. Goblins is an actor model implementation for the Racket programming language. I think if you know some Racket, then the Goblins documentation should be fairly approachable, and I'd love to hear feedback. Not everything is documented, but it should give you a nice taste of what the core ideas are. (Astute readers may observe that Goblins' name shares striking resemblance to another project I have worked on; this is no coincidence and is indeed a hint as to what I think the future direction of that area of work is.)

Most live distributed systems are in some way a language-level actor model implementation, but knowing that you're an actor model implementation may change how you do things. (ActivityPub is itself an actor model protocol, though I think not all implementors realize that.) Goblins is the third generation of an actor model I've written, the previous ones being XUDD and 8sync. (Maybe if you count the big rewrite I did of 8sync to run it on top of fibers, it could be the fourth generation.)

If you read the Spritely blogpost you'll know that distributed games are part of the long con here. This isn't the first time I've written a game system on top of one of these actor model implementations; in fact if you scroll down on 8sync website you'll (currently) see a video of me presenting on Mudsync, a multi-user dungeon written in 8sync, where in the talk instead of slides I had rooms, and the audience was moving around in the world and I was changing it in response to their suggestions.

But the drive of the actor model connected to social distributed games goes back further for me. I initially got interested in an actor model the first time I tried to work on the whole multiplayer game front about a decade ago. A friend and I spent a couple hours experimenting with threads and locks and after the first demo it was obvious that was never going to work. I remembered I had been told by a former coworker that they had used a system that had an actor model + coroutines as its basis; I didn't know what either of those things were yet, but as I looked into them it became clear to me that this was the right route. But one piece since then until recently remained a mystery to me, which was how to manage the complex web of authorization between the objects.

Last year at TPAC, the World Wide Web consortium's conference, I was staying with some people who asked me what I would do if I had unlimited time to work on whatever I wanted. I sheepishly admitted to my dream of a federated social web as a distributed game, and expected to be laughed out of the room. I was surprised to find out that nearly everyone I was working with had some background in this same work and dream. This gave me some hope that I wasn't completely foolish, and the observation that even failure in persuing this ambitious dream would probably result in useful artifacts.

And last year at Rebooting Web of Trust, I hit a big breakthrough. I had the chance to meet Mark S. Miller in person, someone who's work I read but barely understood at the time, and this meeting in some ways changed the direction of my career. For one thing, it lead to us collaborating on the foundation for the ocap-ld specification, which came out of a paper we collaborated on from that event (also available in nicely formatted PDF form). But what I also discovered was that Mark Miller and company had actually built the distributed and secure social network dream in the late 1990s and called it Electric Communities (rare video of it being demonstrated, and a rare video of some of the out-there ideas). What I found out was that they had solved most of the remaining questions about authorization and security through object capabilities, and that was through a pile of object capability patterns built on top of the actor model. While Electric Communities did not survive, its foundation of the the "E" programming language lived on, pulling in many of its good ideas with it. I proceeded to read as much documentation about E and surrounding capability patterns as I could, and this has majorly influenced Goblins' design. (Don't underestimate the depth of ideas on erights.org just because it looks like an ancient Geocities page... it did come from that era after all...)

Another key insight came from discovering the Object-Capability Security in Virtual Environments paper. I won't go into details on this except to say that it's a must-read for this problem domain, with the caveat that it pulls in a lot of terminology baggage from the object capability (aka ocap) community. The ocap community is one of those groups that has so many of the right ideas but which unfortunately is also drowning in its own verbiage, despite true efforts to make the ideas more accessible. We (and I guess I'm part of this group now, so "we" is appropriate) need to do better, but it isn't easy.

Goblins is still in its very early days. Its api is unstable and it surely has bugs (this one in particular I need to deal with, and which even exposed an underlying bug in Racket, which did get fixed quickly because the Racket community is amazing). Please don't build anything production-oriented on top of it yet. That said, I'd love users to try things. Check out the docs, see if they're up your alley.

If you like this kind of work and want to see more of it, consider donating; I don't have a corporate sponsor, so progress is funded by people like you. And keep watching here; more Spritely demos/artifacts/releases on the horizon.