It's hard to tell what this is or how it compares to other things that are out there, but what I latched onto is this:
> Freestyle is the only sandbox provider with built-in multi-tenant git hosting — create thousands of repos via API and pair them directly with sandboxes for seamless code management. On top of that, Freestyle VMs are full Linux virtual machines with nested virtualization, systemd, and a complete networking stack, not containers.
It makes me think of the git automation around rigs in Gas Town: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
Edit: I realize the Loom is a way to look at it. Loom interrupted me twice and I almost skipped it. However it gave me a better idea of what it does, it "invents" snapshotting and restoring of VMs in a way that appears faster. That actually makes sense and I know it isn't that hard to do with how VMs work and that it greatly benefits from having only part of the VM writable and having little memory used (maybe it has read-only memory too?).
So the snapshotting tech is actually 100% independent of Git.
Git is useful for branching vs forking (IE you can't merge two VM forks back together), but all the tech I showed in the Loom exists independently from Git.
The hard part of it was making the VM large and powerful while making snapshotting/forking instant, which required a lot of custom VMM work.
> The hard part of it was making the VM large and powerful while making snapshotting/forking instant, which required a lot of custom VMM work.
I don't find "large and powerful" in reference to a VM to sound compelling. What should be large? The memory? The root disk? As I alluded to in my comment, I'm more curious about what can be made small.
Also I'm skeptical that if I forked a vm running a busy Gas Town that it would be very light or fast in how it forks. A well behaved sqlite I could see, but then I'd wonder why not just fork the storage volume containing the database...
So thats what we did. We've made forking a whole gas town performant in 100s of milliseconds. Try it — you can definitely see it working on free tier.
In respect to large and powerful RAM + Size is important but I was more-so referring to full Linux power. The ability to run nested virtualization, ebpf, fuse, and the powerful features of a normal Linux machine instead of a container.