apple container is more of a docker-style workflow, OCI images, registries, etc. shuru is just micro VMs with checkpointing, much simpler scope.

cool, would love to see it!

yeah, it just means everything runs on your machine. there are services like E2B, sprites.dev and others that give you sandboxes in the cloud. shuru runs VMs locally using Apple's Virtualization.framework, so nothing leaves your Mac.

Unfortunately yes. It's just another stupid marketing buzzword these days.

haven't thought about multi-agent communication yet. each sandbox is fully isolated which is the point. checkpoints help a bit here though, you can branch multiple agents from the same checkpoint so they all start from the same state.

Lima can do a lot of what shuru does if you set it up for it. the difference is mostly in defaults and how much you have to configure upfront. with shuru you get ephemeral VMs, no networking, and a clean rootfs on every run without touching a config file. shuru run and you're in. Checkpoints and branching are built into the CLI rather than being an experimental feature you have to figure out. Lima is a much bigger and more mature project though. Shuru is something I am building partly to learn and partly because I wanted something with saner defaults for this specific use case.

thanks! let me know how it goes

containers work fine for a lot of this. shuru is just what felt more natural to me. less config overhead and i wanted to learn by building it.

Not true, OrbStack uses Virtualization.framework: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36189550

OrbStack has some invasive elements inside it trying to provide filesystem integration, and the filesystem they use is not POSIX compliant and causes breakage with some build systems and other software.

OrbStack is great but it is solving a different problem. it's a full Docker Desktop replacement. shuru is just a thin layer over Virtualization.framework for spinning up throwaway sandboxes.