Good suggestion on listing capabilities, will add a note.

[1]https://github.com/wazero/wazero/blob/2bbd517b7633bf6a126305...

> And what's the public API/stdlib/bindings inside the WASM workers?

Wazero (via Extism) carries the load here. As it stands, the runtime lifts three basic host functions into guest code which enable the RPC-like behaviour, injection of caller-context and basic logging[1], which are in turn referenced in the guest code like in the example[2].

In the reverse direction, guest code exposes it's public APIs via build directives[3], which are handled by the runtime code[4].

Figured that concrete examples might be more helpful here (I hope the formatting works).

[1] https://github.com/Sambigeara/pollen/blob/567e85d5f1407932dd... [2] https://github.com/Sambigeara/pollen/blob/567e85d5f1407932dd... [3] https://github.com/Sambigeara/pollen/blob/567e85d5f1407932dd... [4] https://github.com/Sambigeara/pollen/blob/567e85d5f1407932dd...

I'd agree that Pollen's current cap-enforcement story is limited, I'm not sure what direction I'll be heading in for that, but I was erring on the side of "bring your own enforcement" as a design pattern (ultimately, people deploy their own decision engines as first class seeds in the cluster). Naturally, the enforcement is weaker than the (fascinating) pattern you've landed on--seriously cool.

> and there’s a tiny Clojure-inspired Lisp (“Glia”) that doubles as an LLM-facing or human-facing shell.

This is a _lovely_ abstraction. How does it work? Does the LLM emit Glia directly or is there a translation layer between natural language and the interpreter..?

> It's a les polished compared to what Sam has shipped, but moving fast, and this post has jolted me into sharing a bit before I had planned!

I'm _far_ from polished. I suspect you're underselling your own position here, looks like you have something very compelling. And apologies for the jolt! Certainly happy to compare notes--I (think) I've added my email to my profile.

You could also establish a dev cluster (/environment) where all devs run a local instance. You can iterate on services quickly, expose ngrok-like capabilities by exposing a local dev instance of a server with `pln serve 8080 test_server` for your colleagues to consume with `pln connect test_server`, etc, etc.

A more whacky idea I've not been able to get out of my head which might become possible as the access story solidifies: imagine a customer could access a controlled subset of your companies offering by having a delegated node, running in their own infrastructure, that ultimately you can delegate and revoke at any given time.

ANY decision around network topography or workload placement is a deterministic calculation run by all nodes individually. If all nodes see the same sub-set of peers representing their entire "cluster", they'll all naturally converge on the same view of what the cluster should look like. If the calculated output determines that Node A should claim Seed B, and it doesn't have it, it requests it from a peer who has it.

As soon as the partition recovers, nodes see the additional nodes re-enter the candidate set, which is then added in to future routing and placement decisions.

The main tradeoff to understand here is that you're at mercy of the random (best attempt redundant) placement of a seed. If the entire cluster has, say, 2 replicas stored on any given nodes, if a resultant partition doesn't happen to have either of those two nodes, then the seed will be unavailable until the partition recovers. You can work around this with "smart" initial placements (one near, one close, for example) but you're still at the mercy of random partition events. An additional factor is of course getting very unlucky with dropped gossip events, which would also impact the rate of convergence across the cluster.

I do absolutely despise the complexity of administering modern distributed systems, hence my attempt to make Pollen as ergonomic and (as much as I hate to use this term) batteries-included as possible.

I've not come across either of those projects, oddly. I have a tendency to avoid looking for similar projects during the development of my own, lest I get despondent and run out of steam. Both sound cool, though. I'd say WASM was a natural workload "type" that fit nicely into what I was trying to achieve with Pollen, rather than a driving factor, if you know what I mean.

My intention is for Pollen to become a "generic blob of computational capability" into which you idly `pln seed` a workload and do not have to worry about ANY aspects of managing locality, scale, redundancy etc. You seed a workload onto any node, and you call it from any (other?) node. If you want to add more computational power to the cluster, you fire up Pollen on another machine and `pln invite` -> `pln join`.

Every node also has it's own ed25519 cert. The root key pair (the "don't lose this or you're in trouble" key pair) is used to delegate admin certs to other nodes. I'm also working on a mechanism which allows you to bake any arbitrary properties into a cert (as it stands, these are lifted into the WASM guest code for, say, in-application authz purposes). I have more ideas about how this can be extended in the future.

The root authority can invalidate a participating peer's cert at any point, currently just via a `pln deny` command which is eagerly gossiped around the cluster so other nodes stop talking to the denied node, too. I think this offers some opportunities for some fairly novel applications. Perhaps, in the future, you'll provision a node with a certain level or capability or authority to run on some external infrastructure. It'll have all of the (allowed) capabilities of your cluster, but will act like it's local to the external system. Plus, you can revoke it's access or re-set it's capabilities at any point; `pln grant` eagerly applies across the cluster, too.

The workloads, at the moment, are just anything you can compile to WASM via the Extism PDK. Stateless, for now, but with a view to add shared state and persistence in the near future!

Sorry this was rambly, hopefully it offered something useful.

I'd say "WASM-powered serverless functions" is a reasonable analogy, if your serverless functions maintained a minimal number of live replicas at any one point Also, of course, you're tied to the physical ceiling of the explicit hosts that are underpinning your cluster (N machines which are not dynamic like, say, lambdas are when they auto-provision to match demand).

And yeah, you can also `pln serve` arbitrary services which are then exposed to the cluster, but it's worth mentioning that these will of course not benefit from the inherent, organic autoscaling and locality mechanisms that come with the WASM blobs. I only added it in as a feature so I could retire my (basic) Tailscale usage.

Also, you can `pln seed` arbitrary blobs which can be `pln fetch`ed from other nodes. You can also `pln seed ./public my-site` a static webpage which you can reach from any node with `curl -H "Host: my-site" http://:8080/` (8080 being a configurable port).