Lots has happened since February: the Volcano Summit, a lot of runtime releases, and many apps.
The Urbit Foundation core development team meets publicly every morning at 8am PT to review and merge open pull requests. Join us in the Hacker House to participate.
We often discuss upcoming releases in the Zero K podcast — subscribe for alpha.
We’re moving the [bp] newsletter to a bimonthly cadence. Expect the next one in June accompanying our next Developer Week.
Our Build Parties feature live programming in the Hacker House where we build apps from scratch. Check the [bp] group at ~dister-dozzod-lapdeg/battery-payload for details or follow us on Twitter.
~mastyr-bottec and ~lagrev-nocfep built %tell on March 31st, an application for stars to send a DM to all sponsored planets at once. Check it out here.
~tamlut-modnys and ~lagrev-nocfep built a code grading tool, %grader, on April 14th.
After %grader ~lagrev-nocfep and ~midden-fabler kept working on %global-store: a basic per-app key-value store.
There’ll be at least one more Build Party in April. Watch for announcements in the [bp] group and on Twitter.
Hoon School began in March. It’s a little late to jump in now, but we’ll have another cohort starting in June 2023: sign up here.
App Workshop has began two weeks ago. App Workshop is for developers who want to produce more complex apps after Hoon School and App School. There’s still time to dive in.
New Apps and Updates
Things are popping—Urbit has doubled its number of active developers since last year. ~norsyr-torryn noticed that Hoon is now in the top 50 languages by pull request volume on GitHub. And Volcano Summit saw a lot of new secrets unveiled for the first time publicly. In no particular order, the past couple of months saw:
The Urbit runtime updated from 1.22 on February 14 to 2.1 on March 28. The main highlight for developers and users is the introduction of the 8 GB loom. The loom size can be set at the command line when starting Urbit by including the flag `--loom 32` for 4 GB or `--loom 33` for 8 GB (set by powers of 2 in bytes).
Urbit OS cooled its kernel from 415 K to 414 K. Other than SSS, many of these improvements were quality-of-life changes:
Solid-state subscriptions (SSS) are live (the metaphor: a `$rock` represents a state, and a `$wave` washes over the `$rock`s to change them slowly.)
With the pending renaming of `%garden`, there is a proposal for the Urbit Foundation to maintain a userspace support desk with common libraries, marks, and threads that aren’t part of `%base`. Comment at the pull request.
The next release of Vere in May will include:
Remote scry to allow subscribers to read data from the runtime without generating an Arvo event, leading to better scaling.
The next kelvin release is scheduled for ~2023.5.9 and will require a runtime upgrade. It contains major improvements. Core developers will begin testing that release on live ships this week, and a release candidate will land for application developers on ~marnec-dozzod-marzod on ~2023.4.25. Read more on the Urbit Foundation group in the Infrastructure channel.