This is a long story which is not covered in full here. The short version is that this project was originally intended to implement an IRC federation using an extended superset of the rfc1459/rfc2812 protocol. This concept went through several iterations. The Atheme Services codebase was first considered for development into a "gateway" for IRC networks to connect to each other. That was succeeded by the notion of eliminating separate services-daemons in favor of IRCd-meshing for redundancy and scale. At that point Charybdis/4 was chosen as a basis for the project.
Around this time, the Matrix protocol was emerging as a potential candidate for federating synchronous-messaging. Though far from perfect, it had enough potential to outweigh the troubles of inventing and promoting yet another messaging protocol in a wildly diverse and already saturated space.
Somewhile after, the original collaborators of this endeavor became disillusioned by many of the finer details of Matrix. Many red-flags observed about its stewards, community, and the overall engineering requirements placed on implementations made it clear this project's goals would never be reached in a timely or cost-effective way. Coupled with the political situation and death-spiral of IRC itself, the original collaborators disbanded.
One developer decided to continue by simplifying the mission down to just creating a Matrix server first, and worrying about IRC later, maybe through TS6, or maybe never. This reasoning was bolstered by the ongoing poor performance of Matrix's principal reference implementation in python+pgsql. Today there is virtually nothing left of any original IRCd. The project namespaces like "ircd::" and IRCD_ remain but they too might be replaced by "ctor" etc at some time in the future.
One of the goals of this project is realtime team collaboration and development inside chat rooms. The embedding is intended to replace the old notion of running a "bot" which is just a single instance of a program that some user connects. The embedding facilitates a cloud-esque or so-called "lambda" ecosystem of many untrusted user-written modules that are stored and managed by the server.
The SpiderMonkey embedding is defunct and no longer developed. It is planned to be succeeded by WASM.
