Since the first time two computers communicated directly over a network, programmers have mused about the programs running on those computers. Back in those early days, there was careful external synchronization of programs “Bob, will you load number 3 while I’ll do the same over here?” We like to think that we’re well past that, but in reality, it’s basically still the same situation today. We’ve invented versioning schemes to make that external synchronization easier to swallow, but we’re still just manually putting 2 programs on different computers and hoping they can talk to each other.
And so the industry has slowly tried to evolve solutions to this problem. Java, for instance, strove to allow a server to push down the client version of a program to the browser to run, allowing the server to decide at load time which to push (you remember applet’s don’t you?). Modern web programmers effectively worked their butts off to avoid the problem and instead push a very heavy standards drivin’ approach (hi there W3C!). And because web programming has dominated so much of the industry for the past decade, there hasn’t been a big push to work on portable computing.
Disclaimer: I’m sure people will comment and say “OMG Evan! This person and that person have been working on it for 20+ years! I’m sure thats true, but almost nothing has gone mainstream, such that it has no effect on your everyday programmers.
There are 3 really interesting attempts at bringing portable computing to the everyday programmer I’ve been thinking about this weekend that I thought I’d do a quick post about.
- NaCL – Google’s approach to applets, basically. With a heavy emphasis on C++ as the target language, the aim is squarely at game developers. But I think if you look past immediate browser usage, you can see a separate idea: The ability to generate managed machine code that only runs inside a special harness and can be easily transported. I’m sure the irony of that last sentence NOT being applied to Java will be lost on no one. And in that irony, a nugget of truth: this approach isn’t new. The exact same thing could be applied to Java or really any VM. The place that NaCL deviates is that because it’s the generation of machine code and that the toolkit is a normal C/C++ compiler, it’s possible to compile a VM itself with NaCL to deploy it. Thus NaCL can be seen as a safe way to distribute binaries, which makes it pretty interesting. I’ll call this approach to portable computing the specialized environment approach.
- Docker – I’m talking about docker rather than generically containers or other similar technologies because it’s Dockers pairing of containers with images that are delivered over a network. Certainly a service to download a binary and run it would be trivial, thusly it’s usage of containers that Docker into a proper portable computing environment. The interesting aspect to Docker is that it’s approach is squarely on the computing “backend”. NaCL and it’s spiritual father Java applet focus getting new computation units to and end user directly, where as Docker is about the management of backend services. It’s just that the code for those backend services is delivered remotely on demand, making it a portable computing environment. This is the constrained environment type of portable computing.
- Urbit – Urbit is, well, it feels like the implementation of an idea from a scifi novel. Part of that is on purpose, it’s founder is known to be quite esoteric. Cutting through all the weirdness, I find a kernel of an idea for portable computing. They’ve defined a VM that can run a very simple bytecode and a whole ecosystem around it. The service I found most interesting is the fact that all programs are in their bytecode and all programs are stored in their global filesystem service. This means that it’s trivial for programs written and stored by another computer to be run by an other computer. Add in versioning, public identities, and encryption and you’ve got yourself a really nice little portable computing environment. The fact that the VM so effectively stateless and the services promote storing immutable data, it’s easy to see how a distributed system would work. The problem? It’s all in a really esoteric environment that it going to be incredibly difficult for even the most motivated programmers to get into. This is the isolate environment type.
So, that’s the point of cataloging these here? Well, I started looking at Urbit and thinking how difficult it is for it to get uptick. But the kernel of the idea is super interesting. So could that kernel be transplanted to something like NaCL or Docker to provide a meaningful environment for distributed programming? Urbit’s immutable global file system seems perfect to apply CRDT to, allowing multiple nodes to share a meaningful view of some shared data. Wire in a discovery mechanism that will tie environments together and I think there could be something big there.
