wicrum-wicrun

Remote Scry interface for Gall developers

This document and the interface it describes is subject to change

To scry is to perform a read from Urbit's referentially transparent namespace. In other words, it's a function from a path to a noun (although in some cases, the resulting type may be more constrained). Up to now, we have only supported scrying within the same ship, but from Kelvin 413, it will become possible to scry from other ships.

Lifecycle of a scry

At the moment, when you think of scry you probably think of .^. However, since networking is asynchronous, this is not a suitable interface for remote scry. Instead, a ship that wants to read from a remote part of the namespace will have to pass a %keen task to its Ames, which then cooperates with Vere to produce the desired data. In some future event when the result is available, Ames gives it back as a %tune gift. From the requester's perspective, this is the entire default lifecycle of a remote scry request.

wicrum-wicrun

The target audience is people who are familiar with Urbit's architecture, though not necessarily much of its code.

Plunder and Urbit

As some of you already know, i recently left my job as a core dev for the Urbit Foundation to work on a similar system called Plunder. Plunder was created in 2020 by two former Tlon employees, after their proposal for a new version of Nock was rejected. They have since reworked that significantly and built a reference implementation of their own system. You can follow its continued development on its mailing list.

I've known about Plunder for quite some time now, but their recently released demo -- in which the system is used to serve a 70 GB dataset, complete with metadata and searchable -- made me feel the need to explore it again and in greater detail. Doing this with my personal server doesn't feel like a big ask, but there is currentl