very fair and considered evaluation. i'd like to follow up with a few points worth noting: both the runtime and networking are being overhauled in the interest of addressing the some of the weaknesses you cited (speed and networking issues), and both projects are at fairly advanced stages of development. the networking rewrite is a total conceptual overhaul implementing named data networking (NDN, there is much academic literature about this though i don't think anything has been published about urbit's new model), and the new runtime project makes use of several clever ideas for memory management and predictive processing (https://urbit.org/blog/ares) to achieve very significant speed increases
thanks for sharing these details! Ares is indeed super interesting, and I think it will lead to performance improvements, but I I was also trying to indicate some core design issues that a new runtime cannot fix.
very fair and considered evaluation. i'd like to follow up with a few points worth noting: both the runtime and networking are being overhauled in the interest of addressing the some of the weaknesses you cited (speed and networking issues), and both projects are at fairly advanced stages of development. the networking rewrite is a total conceptual overhaul implementing named data networking (NDN, there is much academic literature about this though i don't think anything has been published about urbit's new model), and the new runtime project makes use of several clever ideas for memory management and predictive processing (https://urbit.org/blog/ares) to achieve very significant speed increases
thanks for sharing these details! Ares is indeed super interesting, and I think it will lead to performance improvements, but I I was also trying to indicate some core design issues that a new runtime cannot fix.