This talk is part of the Speaker Series presented by Agoric with the help from Protocol Labs to bring in-depth understanding on secure distributed programming practices.

Schedule:

6 pm: Doors open, networking, drinks + food

6:30 pm: Chip Morningstar on Capabilities + Asynchronous Messaging + Event Loops

7:30 pm: Brian Warner on Swingset Kernel (Ethereum has the EVM to run Solidity, the Agoric platform has Swingset to run Javascript).

8:30 pm: Social + wrap up

Chip is a pioneer in virtual worlds and online games, designing and leading the creation of Lucasfilm's Habitat, the first MMO, for which, among other things, he coined the term "Avatar" in its modern usage. He co-founded Electric Communities where he was one of the implementors of the E programming language and many other technical precursors to Agoric's approach to distributed systems.

From Chip's talk you will learn how to build successful distributed systems using the paradigm of capabilities, asynchronous messaging and event loops, in contrast to the paradigm of authentication, remote procedure call and threads that is more familiar to many developers.

Brian created Buildbot, a popular continuous-integration system, co-founded the Tahoe-LAFS capability-based secure distributed storage system, and co-authored the prescient security review of Ethereum.

The Agoric platform combines the security of object-capabilities with the credibility and reliability of blockchains. Brian's presentation is a deep-dive into the "Swingset Kernel", the virtual machine which hosts these communicating objects. Where Ethereum has the EVM to run Solidity, the Agoric platform has Swingset to run Javascript.

You'll learn about:

• Swingset "Vats": the unit of termination and resource management
• the Swingset kernel, which routes and schedules messages between Vats
• how Vats use syscalls just like Linux processes
• "C-Lists" that translate object references between Vats and the kernel
• the kernel's object and promise tables
• promise pipelining
• the interaction between a host application and the swingset library
• how transcript replay is used to provide "orthogonal persistence" to Vats
• persistence of kernel state
• how "devices" are used to interact with the outside world

The Swingset library (a part of the Agoric SDK, https://github.com/Agoric/agoric-sdk) can be used in a standalone program, or as a module in the Cosmos-SDK blockchain. The application-level Javascript code is unaware of which kind of machine it lives inside, enabling seamless interoperation between communicating objects dispersed throughout a heterogeneous computation fabric.

You can watch previous presentations by Agoric and Protocol Labs here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhuBigpl7lqth_Ow_eQWZs7NFxmeDw9W8