libretto VS braid-spec

I'm not sure this is actually easy to solve. The basic idea here seems to be that actors coordinate with the help of shared mutable state (the "dataspace"). At this point you're actually back to square one as synchronizing shared state is the core problem with distributed, concurrent systems…

Given that, and the fact that this whole thingy is untyped makes me skeptical. Not even the std. ingredients like type-state, session types, behavioral types, or the like seem to get used. I also don't see linear types here, which go very well with session types / behavioral types, and can help making typing message passing easier.

Also that this approach would be completely network transparent, as I see it, seems like a design flaw. One needs control over the various effects that can occur! Otherwise the points form "distributed systems future work" can't be solved, imho.

And form the practical point of view: There is no Akka / Pekko based Scala implementation? I'm quite surprised, to be honest.

Akka / Pekko is the actor runtime, and Scala is famous for it's eDSL features; besides of course its type-system, which makes thing like Libretto possible, which seems related here:

https://github.com/TomasMikula/libretto

Syndicate-lang looks OTOH more like the usual callback-hell.

But like I've said, I don't get this whole thingy really. I've just clicked through some parts of the web-sites. Most likely I'm just overlooking the elephant in the room. So would be glad to learn more!

(BTW: Very nice web-site design on all the projects. Especially nice typography. Really enjoyed this part while clicking through this stuff.)

Hi! I have a few questions:

1) What are the benefits of the reactive operating systems? Do you have any example use-cases that this does better than traditional approaches?

2) Do you find this related to functional reactive programming at all?

3) Since this is a model of concurrency with eventual consistency, do you see it benefitting from eventually-consistent OT or CRDT data types?

I am working on what might be a related model: https://braid.org and https://stateb.us. We are building a "distributed state abstraction", that we envision will end up in three places:

a) HTTP will upgrade from a state transfer to a state synchronization protocol

b) Applications will be separated into UIs on top of a "web of state" (see https://stateb.us/static/statebus-demo-3-31.mp4 ) and transition from web apps to app webs

c) Operating Systems will replace file systems with state systems; where local variables in memory can persist to disk without explicit read/write calls, and can be read/written across processes without programming overhead.

I am wondering if we are all looking at the same programming abstraction, but from different angles!

Thanks Lakshan!

I don't think my use-case is necessarily a good fit for edge functions. I am trying to achieve what Supabase realtime/multiplayer accomplishes, but generically. I participate informally with the https://braid.org IETF working group, which to over-simplify is CRDTs over HTTP with subscriptions.

I'm interested in web standards and that's what's drawn me to deno, so I'm super excited the more and more I see it being adopted. BroadcastChannel piques my interest because it is perfectly in that gray area of standardization-- it makes total sense on the client and we're on the cusp of discovering what that could look like for servers.

In deno deploy, all the instances of my service are able to be linked together by BroadcastChannel, which I'm viewing as a p2p-style architecture. Ultimately, I'm curious about how this works under the hood and if it would be possible to interoperate a BroadcastChannel between Deno Deploy, Supabase, and say a Raspberry Pi in my house.

I've gone on a bit of a tangent, but I think maybe I should get involved with the WinterCG, since now that I'm putting my thoughts to words-- seems like it fits their charter.

Yes! This is the approach we're taking at https://braid.org -- extending HTTP itself into a decentralized synchronization protocol, so that any application built on top of it can be decentralized.

Specifically, you can divide any application's protocol into two parts:

  - A data synchronization protocol

That doesn't work, because DELETE is defined to delete the entire resource. PUT is defined to replace the resource with the body, which would replace the resource with the patch. Only PATCH is defined to accept a patch and do something special with it.

Another option, though, is to use the Range-Patch spec from: https://github.com/braid-org/braid-spec

Your use-case sounds perfect for Braid: https://braid.org

This works like SSE, but is designed specifically to articulate changes to the state of HTTP/REST resources.

If you're in Javascript, you can use the braidify library: https://www.npmjs.com/package/braidify