The Plunder Project is 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 name Plunder is taken the Scheme tradition of naming systems after evil plots: Racket, Guile, Larceny, Stalin, etc. While Plunder is not a Scheme implementation, it is very much a moral continuation of that tradition. You can think of Plunder as an attempt to create a viable Lisp-machine-like operating system by solving fundamental problems with image based programming, garbage collection, safety, and distributed systems.
The project was started by Benjamin Summers in 2016, and the research has been doine in heavy collaboration with Elliot Glaysher and Mar, and with some ideas and contributions from from Ted Blackman, Joe Bryan, Jack Ek, Liam Fitzgerald, Isaac Visintainer, Michael Hueschen, Anton Dyudin, and others.
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:
Some resources:
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.
Some historical links: