Happy holidays, from the Urbit Foundation, to you. We hope that you are spending this time joyfully with family and friends. This year has been a wild ride, but we're finally moving towards stability. Under the leadership of our founder, Curtis Yarvin, we’re charting an exciting new strategic direction for Urbit.

Over the past three years, we intended to grow an ecosystem. Third party teams would build on Urbit, and their success would prove the power and utility of the platform. We now know that we weren’t yet ready for this.

As the Urbit Foundation, we’re taking sole responsibility for Urbit’s success. Our relentless mission will be to deliver a computing experience into your hands that is useful, tangible, and beautiful, that you own and control completely.

May the new year also help you shed the old and birth the new.

Urbit Christmas

As the year comes to a close, we’re throwing a party to show appreciation to Urbiters that have made exceptional contributions in 2024.

We invite you to join the celebration in the Urbit Hacker House at 10am PT / 1pm ET on Friday, December 27th. Rumor has it that Santa Yarv will be coming to town…

hawk.computer

The vision of Urbit as a “programmable namespace” is something you can experience, today.

%hawk by ~migrev-dolseg is an exciting app that gives one of the best demonstrations of Urbit’s capabilities. This newly released demo shows what you can do with a programmable environment that you own and control.

For a quick overview, check out this excellent X thread by ~milset.

%hawk is available to install and try out at ~dister-migrev-dolseg/hawk

Urwasm Reaches Major Milestone

Mainstream programming languages now run on Urbit, at high speeds. The Urwasm project by ~dozreg-toplud translates Wasm (WebAssembly) to Hoon, allowing conventional programming languages to run on Urbit.

Earlier this year, Phase 1 implemented Wasm in Hoon but lacked optimization and jetting, making it impractically slow.

With Phase 2, the jetting framework is now complete, which boosts performance dramatically. For example, implementations of this year’s Advent of Code challenges run 20-40x faster in Urwasm than in native Hoon.

What’s next? Urwasm does not yet support computations that store data in state. Any app falls into this category. Building apps in mainstream languages requires either further upgrades to Urwasm, or using a mix of Urwasm and Hoon. We’re exploring both next.

Thanks to ~dozreg-toplud for his hard work. We're one step closer to bringing the power of Urbit to the masses.

Urbit Group: ~fansef-dastus/urwasm

Github: https://github.com/Quodss/urwasm

New USTJ Articles

This month, editor Neal E. Davis (~lagrev-nocfep) published new technical articles on Urbit’s research and development.

• Trusting Trust on Mars is an exploration of Urbit’s security through the lens of Ken Thompson’s famous 1983 Turing Award lecture: “Reflections on Trusting Trust”.

• Urbit Networking: Ad Fontes presents an influential document from 2022 that significantly guides the design of Urbit’s networking stack today, including initiatives such as remote scry and directed messaging.

Thanks for checking out this edition of the newsletter. In case you’re not on Urbit yet, you can get a planet and join the UF General group here. As always, we look forward to being on the network, together.

With warm wishes for 2025,

The team @ Urbit Foundation