#  Urbit Pills
What are they huh

##  Ivory
Ivory Pill Performance Comparison:

  C Vere:  0.21 seconds  (6.88 MB/s)
  OCaml:   0.44 seconds  (3.41 MB/s)
  Ratio:   ~2x slower

  So for the 1.5MB ivory pill, we're only 2x slower - totally reasonable! This confirms the problem grows non-linearly with size/complexity.

  What Does the Ivory Pill Do?

  From the docs and C Vere source:

  Ivory Pill = The %zuse core (Hoon standard library) compiled into a pill

  Purpose

  C Vere's I/O drivers (Ames, Behn, Clay, Dill, Eyre, Iris) need access to Hoon standard library functions like:
  - Text parsing/formatting
  - Data structure manipulation
  - Cryptographic operations
  - HTTP parsing

  Rather than reimplement these in C, C Vere:
  1. Loads the ivory pill at startup
  2. Runs u3v_life() lifecycle on it
  3. Keeps the %zuse core available
  4. Calls Hoon functions from C when needed via u3v_wish()

  What It Contains

  - %zuse library: All Hoon stdlib (++  enjs, ++  dejs, ++  by, ++  so, etc.)
  - NOT full Arvo: No vanes, no poke interface, no event processing
  - Structure: ["ivory" core] - just the tagged core

  How C Vere Uses It

  // At startup (pkg/vere/king.c)
  _king_boot_ivory();  // Load ivory pill
  u3v_boot_lite(pil);  // Run u3v_life() on it
  u3A->roc = result;   // Store %zuse core

  // Later, when I/O driver needs a Hoon function:
  u3v_wish("(rap 3 'hello' ' ' 'world')");  // Call into %zuse

  Why It Exists

  Without ivory, every Hoon stdlib function would need to be:
  1. Reimplemented in C (huge effort)
  2. Kept in sync with Hoon version (maintenance nightmare)
  3. Tested separately (double the work)

  Instead, ivory lets C Vere reuse the canonical Hoon stdlib by calling into it as needed.

  Our OCaml Implementation

  We successfully:
  - ✅ Load ivory pill (0.44s)
  - ✅ Validate "ivory" tag
  - ✅ Implement u3v_life() lifecycle formula
  - ❌ Lifecycle execution fails (still debugging)

  For OCaml runtime, ivory would let us:
  - Call Hoon formatters from OCaml I/O drivers
  - Parse/serialize Hoon data structures
  - Use crypto functions without reimplementing

  Bottom line: Ivory is a clever way to avoid duplicating the Hoon stdlib in the runtime. It's fast to load (2x C is fine), but we need to debug why the lifecycle formula fails.