The Plunder Project was a research effort that grew out of the Urbit project, with the goal of reformulating that system with new foundations compatible with the ideas of Haskell, Erlang, and Lisp, to solve performance bottlenecks with compute and IO, and to take a more uncompromising stance towards the core ideals of Urbit: having zero dependencies, and creating stable ABIs through extremely perfectionist design.
The Plunder project is named from the Scheme tradition of naming systems after evil plots: Racket, Guile, Larceny, Stalin, etc. The projects was started and lead by Benjamin Summers, in heavy collaboration with Elliot Glaysher, and the pseudonymous Mar, in with minor collaboration with a few others. The project ran from 2016-2026.
The project ultimately aspires to create a new operating system, completely disjoint from the existing software stack, that you can boot into on real hardware, that offers an experience similar to a Lisp Machine, but using ideas from Pure Functional Programming, from Urbit, and from IPFS, in order to solve the performance and scalability problems which resulted in those systems failing to be competitive. The hope is that the result will be a radically more expressive and less complex system than the operating systems that we use today, with almost everything in the operating system written in strongly typed, functional code, and using functional and type-system guaranties in place of the usual virtual-memory based process isolation paradigm.
This current website is just a stub, but it will be fleshed out with documentation and code for all of the systems designs which came out of the project. PLAN, Wisp, Rex, Silo, Sire, Seal, etc.
The project resulting in a number of novel systems designs, which are now being put into use at two startup companies: XOCore Technologies, which is building a knowledge management system similar to Roam Research, but using the Plunder stack for both a browser-based frontend, and a backend. And Axiomatic Systems, which is developing a new approach to distributed systems programming with a network namespace (like the web), with transactional semantics and subscriptions.
An implementation of the PLAN virtual machine in assembly can be found here, a reference implementation in Haskell with a full-source boot is available here, some code will eventually be pushed to the Sourcehut Repos, and there are also mailing lists on Sourcehut. Most of Plunder's development and communication has happened through SMS and private git hosting, but everything will eventually be available here.
Many Plunder components are still research artifacts and require additional polish before publication. For example, there are several implementations of PLAN, and they all implement slightly different versions of the system, since PLAN itself was still evolving as these systems were built. It will take some time to bring everything into coherence.