Orca

Hi! As always I’m long overdue for an Orca progress update, but don’t get fooled by the relative quietness of yours truly. There’s quite a lot of work in progress on Orca at the moment.

Hey! Time flies and temperatures have risen to a mind-numbing 39°. Yes it’s Celsius, and I’m not prepared for it. But here I am, typing on a laptop that feels like a boiling kettle and sounds like a propeller plane. And I have some updates on what’s been going on for Orca this past couple of months. Grab some drink with ice cubes and have a nice read.

Orca provides a canvas API out of the box, which allows apps to draw 2D vector graphics, and also powers the rendering of the UI system. It is implemented by a WebGPU compute backend which I describe in this post.

We’ve been flying under the radars for the past three months and just landed some big changes: a streamlined user tooling, a full wasm-compatible C standard library, and a new WebGPU vector graphics backend.

I’ve been working on Orca for almost a full year, and since 2023 is wrapping up it’s as good a time as ever to do a recap of what happened!

Here’s a couple non-technical updates about the Orca project. In short: we are adopting a more permissive license, we are moving the code repository to github, and you can now sponsor the development of Orca!

A couple weeks ago we made Orca’s code accessible to the public. I’m sharing some feedback we received, including tooling issues that surfaced when people tried to build and use Orca, and how we intend to address them.

Here’s a short post for a big annoucement: we’re opening the Orca codebase! I want to extend a big thank you to the team of early contributors who made it possible: Ben Visness, Ilia Demianenko, and Reuben Dunnington.

We’re working hard on the Orca runtime, and while this is keeping us busy with code, I figured it shouldn’t make us silent either! So here’s a small update followed by a not so small overview of the runtime’s architecture.

We’re booting up the Orca initiative, which aims to produce a unified platform and set of APIs to develop, distribute and run sandboxed graphical applications on a variety of operating systems.