This isn’t the usual day of the week for Dev Pulses, but today I have some BIG NEWS. After over six months of hard work, we’re ready to birth a new version of Holochain: Holochain RSM (Refactored State Model).
When we started testing HoloFuel, it was the first time we’d seriously challenged Holochain’s design in the real world. We quickly discovered performance bottlenecks and correctness issues, many of which were inherent to the architecture of the code rather than the general concept.
Holochain RSM has a greatly simplified codebase. Now, with fewer layers of abstraction and less code to maintain ourselves, we’re able to focus more on what makes Holochain Holochain. It’s also a lot faster and leaner—some areas of execution could see up to 2000× speed improvements, 2500× less network traffic, and 40× less memory consumption!
Here are the basics:
- Holochain RSM is still built in Rust; it’s just built better.
- DNAs are still written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, but the API and HDK are more straightforward and have fewer dependencies. The WebAssembly engine is also much faster.
- The DHT is fully implemented, and we’re already working on integrity and resilience features that the old Holochain never had. The transport layer is coming and it’ll be based on the QUIC protocol, which offers end-to-end encryption with better performance over unreliable connections.
We’ve published an announcement that gives more details, and we’ll be sharing more articles to get developers up to speed with the new Holochain this week and in the coming weeks. If you’re keen to hear and not just read more, we’ll be holding a special AMA No. 42 with Art Brock on Tuesday, September 22nd, at 8:30 PM UTC. Drop your questions in our quick form. And the Holochain Forum is always open for dev chatter.
If you want to get started right away, clone the new Holochain GitHub repo and follow the instructions in the readme!
