If you have English-style tower bells near you, it's worth checking out, even if only to listen.

surely you must be joking.

You and me both. They're doing neat stuff, but I wonder how many other potential customers feel that way too.

What is Oxide's market? It feels a bit like advanced alien technology that is ultimately a little too weird and expensive for most enterprises to adopt.

it's too bad too. The concepts behind Manta were such a great idea. I still want tools that combine traditional unix pipes with services that can map-reduce over a big farm of hyperconverged compute/storage. I'm somewhat surprised that the kubernetes/cncf-adjacent world didn't reinvent it.

- Prototyping a cute little SSH-based sorta-BBS, inspired by the Spring '83 protocol, but terminal-centric rather than web-based. It's called Winter '78, and if we get another Great Blizzard this year, I'll be able to make some progress on it!

- Another prototype, for an experimental HPC-ish batch system. Using distributed Erlang for the control plane, and doing a lot of the heavy lifting with systemd transient units. Very much inspired by HTCondor as well as Joyent's (RIP to a real one) Manta.

Their docs mention they have a custom kernel module, which I suppose is (today) shipped out of tree. Ceph is in-tree and also has a FUSE implementation.

The docs mention that TernFS also has its own S3 gateway, while RADOSGW is fully separate from CephFS.

To that end, I've most recently been hacking on Robert Virding's Luerl (https://github.com/rvirding/luerl), working to adapt the Lua test suite to chase down some small compatibility issues between PUC Lua and Luerl. While Lua is a lovely language, it would also be swell to get Fennel working under Luerl. I wrote a game for the LÖVE jam a few months ago in Fennel and it was a pleasant way to dip my toes into lisp-likes.

I've also been adding things to control plane software, Overworld, here and there: https://github.com/saltysystems/overworld Happily all of the Protobuf and ENet stuff that I've already built nicely carries over into the LÖVE world.

I would say BEAM itself is not particularly sandboxed, and certainly clusters of Erlang nodes assume a lot of shared trust.

Server backend framework: https://github.com/saltysystems/overworld

Chat server implementation (Erlang): https://github.com/saltysystems/chat_server_example

Chat client implementation (Godot): https://github.com/saltysystems/chat-client-example

The idea is essentially: An Erlang-based control plane, supporting ENet and WebSocket connection modes, with Protobuf for messages. Erlang has an excellent concurrency story, and I think it's a great fit for game servers. I've wrapped up a bunch of this work into behaviors on the Erlang side, such that developers can target the "gen_zone" behavior (for instance) to implement a tick-based game server. I'd like to expand that into other types of games, such as turn-based games.

I've also got a Godot plugin for generating a client library based on your protobuf schema. The plugin handles session stuff, exposes functions for client-to-server messages, and emits signals for server-to-client messages.

These days I'm working on integrating Luerl (Lua in Erlang) and Love2D support. I want to be able to take advantage of Erlang on the back-end while writing the majority of game logic in Lua. Further down the road I want to explore hot reloading parts of the Lua game state on the client/server, perhaps with an in-game editor, to develop the game "inside-out", in a way.