Short answers, plain words. Where the answer is "not yet" or "I don't know," it says so - that's the point of this page.
1. What is Orbit? A statically typed language for APIs and microservices. It compiles fast and needs little to run, so it stays fast even under load. I'm building it to test whether servers can do the same work with less energy - still measuring how far that goes.
2. Is Orbit ready for production? No. It's 0.1.0 pre-release research. Reads, writes, bearer auth and path parameters all work; what isn't there is migrations, multipart uploads, and latency percentiles. Good for learning and experimenting; don't bet a business on it.
3. What do I need to build it? A C compiler (gcc, clang, or MSVC), Python 3.10+, and git. That's it - no giant dependencies. See Getting Started.
4. How is this different from Go, Rust, or Node? I don't compare against other languages with claims - only with same-machine, same-workload measurements, published with method. Those measurements don't exist yet in publishable form. What I can say structurally: Orbit compiles to readable C99, reclaims memory per request with arenas, and measures its own resource use out of the box.
5. Is Orbit "green" / eco-friendly? It's an engineering project whose result could be less energy per request - not an ecological identity. I don't claim energy savings until they're measured with hardware, workload, and method recorded. Anyone telling you otherwise about 0.1.0 is ahead of the data.
6. What can I build today? Read-heavy JSON services over SQLite: routes, query values, request bodies, filtered queries, status codes, live telemetry. The Tour takes 30 minutes; the tutorials go further.
7. What can't Orbit do yet? The honest list: migrations, multipart uploads (stub), latency percentiles, joules on Windows, graceful drain on Windows, multi-host clustering. Full list with workarounds: Known Limitations.
8. When does create() return false?
When the id already exists - it is the primary key - or when
the payload has no usable fields. delete() answers false
when no row was removed, which is how a handler tells a 404 from
a write. Code both branches; they're real answers, not filler.
9. Is the language stable? Will my code compile next month? No stability promise before 1.0. Minor releases in the 0.x series may include documented breaking changes (see Versioning). Pin your compiler version in CI.
10. Does Orbit have generics / async / pattern matching?
Unions and async fn exist in the reference; collection APIs,
concurrency ergonomics, and module imports are still settling.
Keep business logic simple, cover it with tests, and file an
issue when you hit a wall - I read everything.
11. How do I set the port?
Pass it as the first argument: ./service 8080. Default is
3000. There's no config-file port yet.
12. Where's the database file?
orbit.db in the service's working directory, created on
first start with four tables and demo seed rows. Back it up by
copying the file while the service is stopped.
13. Why did my DB service exit with no message on Windows?
sqlite3.dll must sit next to the exe. Copy it from
runtime/vendor/win-x64/. Non-DB services don't need it.
14. How do I run two copies?
orbit cluster up --nodes 2 --port-base 8100 --service service.orb - single host only, no failover. Verified walkthrough:
Deploy tutorial.
15. How do I know it's healthy?
GET /health if you write one, process liveness via
cluster status, and live counters at /metrics and
/_ledger/data. There are no built-in alerts or dashboards.
16. Is Orbit faster than X? I don't know yet in any publishable sense. I have no cross-language measurement of Orbit against anything, so I am not going to imply one. Ask again after someone publishes a run with the hardware, the flags, the workload and the spread.
17. What does "stays fast under load" mean concretely? Today: Kynx admission control sheds load (429s past budget) and per-request arenas bound memory growth. With numbers and method attached - otherwise it's just words, and words are not evidence.
18. Can I measure energy per request? On Linux with RAPL or a wall meter, yes, following the guide. On Windows, no joules - report CPU time and memory as labeled proxies. My docs never convert one to the other.
19. Who builds Orbit, and why should I trust it? I'm Joaquín, building solo in Argentina on modest hardware - which is the point: the constraint is the design brief. Trust comes from the verification gates (bootstrap, parity, behavior suite all in CI) and from publishing limits next to features, not from my claims.
20. How can I help?
Run the Tour, file issues with repros (small .orb
files plus expected vs actual), and grow the behavior suite -
one focused test per behavior. Start with
Contributing. Bug reports with failing
examples help more than feature requests right now.