Urbit OS and runtime development has been active, but the pace of releases has slowed to balance the need for developers to push updates for new kelvin versions.
Core Development is becoming more public. Project management is now conducted in the public urbit/pm repository, where you can find our meeting calendar, meeting notes, release checklists, and more.
Urbit Improvement Proposals, or “UIPs”, are now live in the urbit/UIPs repository. Alongside managing our work in public, we’re now making the process of determining what’s on the roadmap public as well.
The biggest announcement from the past couple of months was the release of Fine (fee-nay), the remote scry protocol. Fine changes how desk source code is distributed and allows Gall agents to use the scry namespace. You can learn how to use it here.
Demand paging allows a ship to reserve memory as needed, reducing the memory load for a running ship.
JSON jets dramatically sped up JSON serialization and deserialization.
Noun channels are now supported in Eyre. Learn more.
HTTP error handling in Eyre has been improved.
Otherwise, various performance fixes and improvements saw the runtime increment from 2.2 to 2.9.
Events & Classes
Another semester of Hoon School will soon be in session. Starting this weekend, you’ll once again be able to take live online classes and learn Urbit’s programming language. It’s your last chance to sign up. Do so here.
What comes after Hoon School? App School of course. This begins after Hoon School, on August 21, 2023. Sign up to learn how to build Urbit apps.
Throw in your hat for the Urbit 2023 Hackathon. Individuals and teams will compete for prizes to see who can build the best Urbit product. This begins the last week of August, 2023
Get ready for u/acc: the Urbit Accelerator. Applications are now open, and the program starts July 24th, 2023. Enter your info now to apply for start-up funding from the Urbit Foundation and receive hands-on support from experienced Urbit devs. Read more here.
Tlon is working hard on Groups and Talk. To that end, they have retired the %landscape desk in favor of %garden, which may impact your code if you intend to use s3-store, settings-store, or hark.