Top all-time · #1194
Spritely Institute
Company blog · spritely.institute/newsprogrammingsystemssecurity
Spritely Institute is the company blog at spritely.institute, writing about programming, systems and security. Since 2022, 59 different Hacker News readers have linked it 145 times, most often “Spritely Institute: fixing community on the Internet with decentralized systems”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Spritely Institute for its Hoot Scheme-to-Wasm compiler, the Goblins actor-model project, and news posts on running Scheme in the browser, often as pointers to related projects.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Spritely Institute: fixing community on the Internet with decentralized systems13 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2022-07-12
- Hoot: Scheme to WebAssembly11 people · 23 mentions · first linked 2023-11-02
- Goblins: Distributed, Transactional Programming with Racket and Guile10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2023-06-08
- A Scheme Primer7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-07-06
- Building interactive web pages with Guile Hoot5 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-11-30
- Composing capability security and conflict-free replicated data types3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-12-03
- Directly compiling Scheme to WebAssembly: lambdas, recursion, iteration3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-05-30
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-08-18
- Spritely Goblins v0.11.0, time travel distributed debugger and more2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-08
- A distributed time-traveling debugger for Spritely Goblins2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-04-12
What Hacker News says?
Scheme doesn't have restarts as a core concept like Common Lisp, but it does have continuations. For the Scheme implementation I worked on [0], the exception system is built on top of the continuation system. In other words, Scheme exceptions are not Wasm exceptions. However, we did find a use for Wasm exceptions in the implementation of the runtime. We realized it would be useful to mark the entry point into Scheme…
Comment linking /hoot/
on “WASM 3.0 Completed”Submitted A Scheme Primer as a story · 164 points
HN discussionHere's a fun example of a language that takes advantage of this: https://spritely.institute/hoot/
Comment linking /hoot/
on “WASM 3.0 Completed”Submitted Cirkoban: Sokoban meets cellular automata written in Scheme as a story · 114 points
HN discussionyou can have both! https://spritely.institute/hoot/
Comment linking /hoot/
on “I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL”Submitted Make a game with Hoot for the Lisp Game Jam as a story · 102 points
HN discussionA fun thing to do with google's search engine: look for "Scheme tutorial". For me, the links are: 1. Arun Muthu's Programming in Scheme ( https://medium.com/atomic-variables/programming-in-scheme-th... ) Part 1 of a 4-year-old series of blog posts (on Medium) that has no other parts. 2. Yet Another Scheme Tutorial ( http://www.shido.info/lisp/idx_scm_e.html ) A decent looking Scheme tutorial, undated. 3. A Scheme Pr…
Comment linking /static/papers/scheme-primer.html
on “US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case”Submitted Building interactive web pages with Guile Hoot as a story · 68 points
HN discussionI work on a Scheme to Wasm GC compiler called Hoot. https://spritely.institute/hoot/ Languages like Kotlin, Scala, and OCaml also target Wasm GC now.
Comment linking /hoot/
on “Google Sheets ported its calculation worker from JavaScript to WasmGC”Submitted Spritely Goblins v0.13.0: Object persistence and easier IO as a story · 62 points
HN discussionGuile Scheme: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/index.ht... It looks like it should be good. There is a lot written. However, it's extremely disjointed and unfairlt assumes readers know things. It uses terms not defined yet, or even at all. As a taste, assume you are new to lisp and scheme. Try reading the Chapter 3: Hello Scheme![1] It contains so much mind bogglingly useless information presented…
Comment linking /static/papers/scheme-primer.html
on “Two open source projects with great architecture documentation”Submitted A Scheme Primer as a story · 53 points
HN discussionHow does this compare to Spritely Goblins? I had a good chat with Christine about it at a conference. She said "Ah, you've been infected with the capabilities virus too. My condolences." https://spritely.institute/goblins/
Comment linking /goblins/
on “Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]”Submitted Shepherd × Goblins Update as a story · 29 points
HN discussionI really like the idea of the fediverse, so I donate to lemmy[0] and the spritely institute[1]. I also donate to asahi linux[2]. [0] https://join-lemmy.org/ [1] https://spritely.institute/ [2] https://asahilinux.org/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?”Submitted Distributed System Daemons: More Than a Twinkle in Goblins' Eye as a story · 16 points
HN discussionStandards can fix this stuff: https://spritely.institute/ Spritely is an effort to fix the problems that remain with ActivityPub.
Comment linking /
on “The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off”Submitted A tour of Spritely Institute's tech as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSome games to play: https://spritely.institute/arcade/ The underlying tech might be more fun: https://spritely.institute/hoot/ Hoot is a Spritely project for running Scheme programs on the web, featuring a Scheme to Wasm compiler and a general-purpose Wasm toolchain. https://spritely.institute/goblins/ https://files.spritely.institute/papers/spritely-core.html At the heart of Spritely is Goblins, its distributed obj…
Comment linking /goblins/
on “A Friendly Introduction to Racket”Submitted Hoot 0.9.0 Released as a story · 12 points
HN discussionAgreed, but the browser never got the identity/contacts bit down. So what would be a relatively simple social app when you can rely on your existing social graph becomes much more complicated and loses out on network effects when it has to be its own completely independent site. Now, I’m not saying we should have this as a centralized app either. The closest and most interesting thing I’ve seen along these lines in…
Comment linking /
on “Super apps are proliferating across emerging markets”Submitted Hoot: Scheme to WebAssembly as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThat is why I created https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/guile-examples . I like GNU Guile and many things exist, even in the batteries that are included, but are not easy to find or one needs to figure out how to effectively use them. Also got an awesome list somewhere, but I need to migrate that to codeberg later. Compared to some other languages, the ecosystem is small though. While in Python often you have 3…
Comment linking /
on “GNU Artanis – A fast web application framework for Scheme”Submitted End-to-end encrypted relays for OCapN as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI think I agree overall, just want to point out that with Wasm, you still end up using a fair bit of the built-into-browser js to accomplish things not purely computational. Especially in this context with Hoot [1], where things like appendChild are external functions you call inside the scheme. One could theoretically do this for much of the js standard library in any kind of wasm context. 1. https://spritely.insti…
Comment linking /news/building-interactive-web-pages-with-guile-hoot.html
on “Tree-shaking, the horticulturally misguided algorithm (2023)”Submitted Guile Hoot v0.5.0 Scheme to WebAssembly compiler released as a story · 8 points
HN discussioni encourage the readers of this comment thread to check out the spritely institute, especially it's blog [0]. i don't wanna spoil what it's all about, but i ensure you it's a topic (and institute!) worth diving into. i poured 10h+ just reading the blog and all the related links and projects :) [0] https://spritely.institute/archive/
Comment linking /archive/
on “Lisp: Icing or Cake?”Submitted Guile Hoot 0.6.0 Released as a story · 7 points
HN discussionBell Labs is wonderful to read about, and I've really loved delving into it. Alan Kay's talks in particular. However, it should be seen as a starting point! Alternative hypothetical pasts and futures abound. One issue is that the stuff from the past always looks more legendary seen through the lens of nostalgia; it's much harder to look at the stuff around you and to go through the effort of really imagining the thi…
Comment linking /
on “The Influence of Bell Labs”Submitted Spritely Goblins v0.15.0: Goblins in the Browser – Spritely Institute as a story · 6 points
HN discussion
