Windansea
Release v0.8 - Windansea
The Solana team is proud to release version 0.8.0 of our high-performance blockchain software. In this release, we introduce the LAMPORT smart contract engine, our biggest innovation since Avalanche replication. With LAMPORT (Language-Agnostic, Memory-oriented, Parallel-friendly, Optimized Run-Time), we can execute smart contracts concurrently, and written in the client’s choice of programming language. Furthermore, we demonstrate Solana’s built-in smart contract language Budget can target LAMPORT without any loss in performance. The two features that allow LAMPORT to work:
- Client-owned memory identified by public keys. By declaring ownership upfront and separating the program’s state from the program, the runtime knows which contracts can safely be executed concurrently.
- Solana’s blockchain-encoded VDF tells validator nodes at precisely what times they need to end up in the same state. Between those times, they are free to introduce non-deterministic behavior as-needed to improve execution times.
Major Features And Improvements
- Initial support for web-based clients via JsonRPC
- Accounts with state: forms the basis for Solana's smart contracts engine
- Dynamic testnet deployment for Google Cloud SDK - run your own testnet!
- 20% performance improvement over v0.7 in transactions per second
- Improved metrics and network monitoring
- Simpler and more robust rendezvous with gossip
- Simpler and more consistent CLI interfaces
Breaking Changes
- Network rendezvous and network ports have moved from hard-coded to ad-hoc
- Transaction format, ledger format, and wire format for replication are incompatible with previous releases. Follow-on releases are also likely to break this.
Known Issues
- Heavily trafficked testnets are suffering from our aggressive out of memory approach.
- Server restart may fail on networks with heavy traffic with "LastIdNotFound" #1171
Thanks to our Contributors
This release contains contributions from many people at Solana, as well as: Nikhil Saraf