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2026-02-04.log

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<ridley>Can someone post in here when the FOSDEM recordings are up? I managed to catch Dave's first presentation but wasn't able to watch any of the others live.
<PuercoPop>How expensive are vats? Are they in the general vicinity of a thread or more of a green thread? f/e would it make sense to model an ActivityPub server with one vat per resource (Actor/Inbox/Outbox/Followers/etc) or is more like if I have a web server I spin one vat per CPU and have each vat handle multiple requests?
<mange>I don't know the answer, but https://files.spritely.institute/docs/guile-goblins/0.17.0/Vats.html says: "A vat is an event loop that runs continuously in a single thread [...]"
<PuercoPop>Yeah, I saw that. I took it to mean like it can only one thing/task/actor at a time
<ArneBab>PuercoPop: here it starts the vat with "call-with-new-thread" https://files.spritely.institute/docs/guile-goblins/0.17.0/Making-vats.html but the package requires guile-fibers https://codeberg.org/spritely/goblins/src/branch/main/guix.scm#L52 -- so I’d expect that the thread is a fiber (means you can easily have a huge number of these)
<ArneBab>at least there’s make-fibrous-vat ⇒ https://codeberg.org/spritely/goblins/src/commit/2fa8da60b902637430cc5e46db8ac315b78eefda/goblins/vat.scm#L1025
<dthompson>hey everyone, online for just a moment before my flight back from FOSDEM
<dthompson>ridley isn't here right now but regarding FOSDEM recordings: 3 out of 4 of my talks are now viewable and the 4th should be coming soon. I believe the other talks need review by christine and jessica when they get back home.
<dthompson>PuercoPop: vats are green threads aka fibers
<dthompson>so they're cheap in that regard. it's *not* one pthread per vat.
<dthompson>ArneBab: that example in the manual is showing how to make a custom vat that uses a pthread. just for demonstration purposes. you're right that the default vat implementation uses fibers.
<ArneBab>dthompson: thank you!
<ArneBab>sneek: later tell ridley: you can see the status of the videos on https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/events/ -- two out of three from Dave are already online.
<sneek>Got it.
<ArneBab>I had completely missed that the CRDT room existed ⇒ more talks to watch
<theesm1>hey everyone o/ re our goblins shepherd discussion at guix days: replaced my guix home shepherd with the goblins shepherd (based on the spritely/shepherd repo) as promised on my train trip back home & it didn't even cause chaos & is running stable so far :o
<ArneBab>theesm1: where can I learn more?
<dthompson>theesm1: WHOA really?
<dthompson>*I* haven't even done that and I also haven't run the goblins shepherd build in awhile
<dthompson>that's incredible
<theesm1>ArneBab: i think this post https://spritely.institute/news/shepherd-goblins-update.html has the most recent summary on the efforts
<dthompson>yeah that's right
<dthompson>the newest update is just that ludo gave me commit access to shepherd today
<dthompson>so we are going to *slowly* proceed with bleeding edge sheperd experiments
<theesm1>dthompson: yup, was surprised how flawless it worked! got a bit of train delay right now and two hours to spare, so maybe i'll even feel experimental enough to drop it in as PID1 even though I'd expect breakage then
<dthompson>you may void your warranty ;)
<theesm1>always looking forward to make my weird computer setup even weirder on the pocket reform :p (if there are metrics you're interested in let me know! like ram usage over time compared to non-goblins shepherd etc.)
<dthompson>I would be interested in stats like that!
<dthompson>we've been so focused on making it work at all that we haven't done any measurements ourselves yet
<dthompson>I expect it to have higher baseline memory usage which is probably fine but what I don't want is unbounded growth due to leaks
<dthompson>our internal dogfood chat application has a server process that has had many months of uptime without crashing or exhausting server resources so that's encouraging to me
<dthompson>but who knows what may be lurking
<theesm1>yes, i'll try to share stats after a week of usage (think my atop records those anyways, so maybe that'll even allow a comparison to before... kinda curious about that)
<ArneBab>theesm1: thank you!
<ArneBab>I’l have to switch to guix home first, I think -- still using a plain manifest.
<ridley>Ooh, glad to see the shepherd experiments are progressing
<sneek>Welcome back ridley, you have 1 message!
<sneek>ridley, ArneBab says: you can see the status of the videos on https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/events/ -- two out of three from Dave are already online.
<ridley>Thanks!
<ArneBab>Glad to help ☺
<ridley>Guess I have lots of things to watch now!
<ArneBab>sneek: later tell dthompson: shepherd on goblins sounds like goblins is becoming more critcal (fleet management), so it could be time for pentests. Sadly the security testing capacity of https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/review/ has been exhausted …
<sneek>Got it.
<ridley>Ah... I was just thinking yesterday I should make sure to get in the NLnet security testing queue.
<ridley>That is unfortunate news
<theesm1>hope the general nlnet/horizon grants budget will increase within the next years (as it seems that there's been increased political interest in doing so during the last few months)
<ridley>That would be great!
<ridley>Looking at the FOSDEM talk list is always overwhelming. Any recommendations outside of the Spritely ones?
<ArneBab> you may want to look here for funding of goblins, hoot, emacs, and goblins-shepherd sounds like it would be a good match: https://nlnet.nl/events/20260211/OIS-matchmaking/index.html
<ArneBab>ridley: the ones I plan to watch: https://video.fosdem.org/2026/h1309/9DEU7E-intro_to_webtransport_-_the_next_websocket.av1.webm https://video.fosdem.org/2026/k3201/SXSAML-brassica-chat-with-goblins-ocapn.av1.webm https://video.fosdem.org/2026/k3201/JX7Y3D-ux-design-for-local-first.av1.webm https://video.fosdem.org/2026/k3201/8PD9LQ-local-first-peer-to-peer-with-orbit-db.av1.webm https://video.fosdem.org/2026/k3201/NFY8ND-flec-
<ArneBab>developing-new-crdts.av1.webm https://video.fosdem.org/2026/k3201/EFHNGH-seed-hypermedia-digital-sovereignty.av1.webm https://video.fosdem.org/2026/h1309/G3FRDA-beyond_javascript_wasm_gc_present_and_future.av1.webm https://video.fosdem.org/2026/k3201/SXSAML-brassica-chat-with-goblins-ocapn.av1.webm
<ArneBab>(includes some spritely)
<ridley>Thanks for the suggestions!
<ArneBab>also https://video.fosdem.org/2026/aw1126/TXKLRJ-we_d-build_it_but_they_didnt_come.av1.webm https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/TXKLRJ-we_d-build_it_but_they_didnt_come/
<ArneBab>sorry that it’s just the video links: I downloaded them to watch them offline
<ArneBab>includes some goblins …
<ridley>No problem, I can figure it out
<theesm1>ridley: the what's new in git talk on the main track day 1 was interesting, can't remember the exact title though
<ridley>theesm1: "Evolving Git for the next decade"?
<theesm1>yes, i think that's the one
<ArneBab>One that I watched live was "how we scaled mercurial to pull 100x faster": https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/77QF9T-hg-100x/
<ArneBab>that’s also a pretty good overview of a wide view to performance programming.
<PuercoPop>ArneBad: dthompson: Thanks!