What is Plunder?



                  PLUNDER IS AN OPERATING SYSTEM


                  Plunder is a new operating system paradigm,
                  built using pure functional programing, type
                  systems, and the actor model.

                  Plunder will ultimately supplant UNIX, the
                  filesystem, and the database as the primary
                  organizational structures of computing.



                  PLUNDER IS LISP


                  A minimal, functional evaluation model (PLAN).

                  A language bootstrapped using macros (Sire).

                  An image-based software paradigm: a Lisp Machine
                  for the modern era.

                  A name in the Scheme tradition: Guile, Larceny,
                  Stalin, Racket, Plunder.



                  PLUNDER IS MAXWELL'S EQUATIONS OF SOFTWARE


                  The PLAN specification fits on a single page.

                  The production PLAN interpreter is just 2500
                  lines of assembly -- no libc.

                  The Sire compiler is 2000 lines of pure Sire.



                  PLUNDER IS HASKELL


                  A lazy, typed, purely functional programming
                  system with monadic IO.

                  An imperative DSL for performance-sensitive code.
                  (like the ST monad, but lower level).



                  PLUNDER IS ERLANG


                  An actor model, where processes communicate
                  by message passing with no shared mutable state.

                  Extremely lightweight processes, mailboxes,
                  error handling, and supervision trees.

                  Per-process private heaps and private GC.

                  Message passing without copies.



                  PLUNDER IS URBIT


                  Plunder supports *permanent processes* backed by
                  disk, which transparently resume on restart.

                  Processes on disk are represented as a closure
                  for the state, and all of the inputs since then.

                  All code is data -- totally normal data.  Data
                  which can be hashed and serialized.



                  PLUNDER IS BIG


                  Plunder can support terabytes of live data.

                  There is no need to serialize data or store it
                  in files, everything remains in normal data
                  structures on a shared heap.

                  Most systems fall prey to GC performance issues
                  at scales orders of magnitude smaller, but
                  Plunder does not.

                  This is possible without complex implementation
                  strategies.  It is achieved through architecture;
                  the entire system is designed around this goal.