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Solana’s Firedancer shopper — a high-performance implementation of the blockchain’s software program being constructed by Soar — was first introduced in 2022.
Practically three years later, the undertaking nonetheless comes with coaching wheels.
That’s a really very long time within the crypto world, so when Firedancer developer Michael McGee joined me on the Lightspeed podcast this week, I used to be curious to get his tackle the shopper’s timeline. McGee painted an enormously troublesome engineering process: rewriting a poorly documented codebase from scratch whereas the unique software program sees fixed upgrades.
“The truth that…the product is alive…is, I feel, fairly spectacular,” McGee stated of Firedancer.
Firedancer’s greatest present impediment is the conformance downside, McGee stated, the place the validator should completely match the present Agave shopper’s conduct beneath all circumstances. Conformance is made tougher by the truth that Solana developer store Anza ships a number of new code, so the software program is one thing of a “transferring goal,” McGee stated.
Anza’s proposed Solana consensus rewrite, Alpenglow, is a “excellent instance of one thing that makes our life very, very troublesome,” McGee stated, noting that he had personally carried out what he noticed as the absolute best proof-of-history implementation into Firedancer.
Underneath Alpenglow, proof-of-history will go away, making all that work moot.
Within the meantime, Firedancer’s extra restricted shopper has seen rising adoption. Frankendancer is as much as 9.3% of all staked SOL, based on Blockworks Analysis information. Validators working Frankendancer have observed better-packed blocks, we reported beforehand.
