Goblins: Distributed, Transactional Programming with Racket and Guile

by alhazrodon 1/31/26, 2:05 AMwith 17 comments
by mccoybon 2/4/26, 4:06 PM

How does this model compare to the syndicated actor model of Tony Garnock-Jones?

(which, as far as I can tell, also supports capabilities and caveats for security)

Neat work!

by ryukafalzon 2/4/26, 11:26 PM

I've been an excited user of Goblins for several years now. So far only outside of $dayjob, which has limited the amount of time I've been able to spend with it, but it's very fun to work with if you like the actor model.

I think my brain naturally wants to think about things in terms of sending messages between smaller components of a program, so Goblins fits the way I think very well. It's also what introduced me to object-capability security, which is a lot more brain-bendy when you're first trying to understand it, but after a lot of reading and playing with Goblins I find myself wishing many more things used ocaps. :)

by NeutralForeston 2/4/26, 2:33 PM

They also have a scheme to webassembly transpiler called Hoot. They do crazy interesting work!

by backronymnon 1/31/26, 9:11 AM

Spritely develops very interesting, high-level software.

by Kinranyon 1/31/26, 9:20 AM

Feels like there's a protocol missing: one that can be used by all parts of a persistent computing system without constraining the system as a whole

by kayo_20211030on 2/4/26, 3:25 PM

Interesting. I looked through the docs and couldn't find an FAQ or anything that would answer my question of why Spritely decided to develop Goblins. Is there a doc for that? What's its differentiation from something like Erlang, or is it just me missing the point, and comparing apples with bicycles?

by plagiariston 2/4/26, 5:00 PM

> Could dataspaces be a suitable system layer foundation, perhaps replacing software like systemd and D-Bus?

The animation and this statement with clear practical usage got me interested. Is there active work going on in this area? I'd like to see how that interacts.