This week we made great strides toward refining the architecture of EOS and defining the developer API. In particular we have identified a programming model that should enable parallelism while maximizing ease of use and clarity of the code.
Updated Example Contracts
Those who have been following github may have noticed that we have started to integrate a number of example contracts to test our architecture and ensure we can cover the desired use case
it looks like normal sequential code
but it can transfer among two pairs of users in parallel
What does this mean? It means that while Alice is transferring to Bob, Sam can be transferring to Jill. The performance of this currency contract is no longer limited by the single threaded performance constraints of prior currency contracts.
Start of Exchange Contract
We have also implemented a simple exchange contract that accepts deposits and withdraws from two different currency contracts:
assert( false, "notified on transfer that is not
What is interesting about this implementation is that deposits and withdraws occur without any asynchronous callbacks or other complex pending states. Rather than the user asking the exchange to tell the currency contract to withdraw funds, the exchange gives everyone permission to transfer from the exchange with the caveat that the exchange's handler for transfers is called on both deposits and withdraws. If a user attempts to withdraw more than their balance with the exchange contract the handler will reject the transfer attempt.
We have not quite yet implemented working tests of the exchange contract deposit and withdraw, but that is on the agenda for next week. We will also be implementing a basic social media application to prove that we have all the existing use cases covered.
Synchronous Calls
One of the biggest developments this week as an architecture that allows synchronous calls among tightly coupled applications while still retaining most of the benefits of parallelism. A future blog post will go into greater detail on our memory and parallel execution structure.
Cost of Storage
Some people have expressed concerns that if tokens are worth $30 billion dollars and there is only 1 TB of storage capacity that the cost of storage will be too high. I have prepared an article that explains how we address this and keep the cost of storage mostly independent from token price.
EOS.IO development is making great strides!
