Post
Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [PRE-ANN] Qeditas: A Formal Library as a Bitcoin Spin-Off
by
Bill White
on 07/06/2016, 03:47:05 UTC
Hello.

I can prepare a newer snapshot if you are interested in it. I don't think it is a real difference,  but can do it if you need it to save your time.) Tell me please if it should be done and I start to work.

You can if you want, but it's probably better to wait. The earliest I can imagine the Qeditas network launching is in late 2016. It's likely that if someone wants a fresher snapshot, then they will want it to be nearer to the time of the launch than now. The user sfultong (earlier in this thread) did some work to help people create snapshots. I am not sure of the status of his work, but if you do decide to take a snapshot his work might help you.

Something that would be much more helpful (and probably easier) would be to integrate the Qeditas OCaml code with some standard library for persistent storage of key-value pairs, like leveldb. Trent Russell tried to do this, but encountered some difficulties. In the end, he implemented his own file based storage "database" module. I have recently finished documenting his database code in Chapter 6 of the Technical Documentation:

http://qeditas.org/qeditastechdoc.pdf

That code is in src/db.ml and src/db.mli in the dev branch.

Integrating with leveldb (or something similar) would almost certainly have better performance.

There is a chapter in the OCaml manual that explains how to call C functions:

http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/intfc.html

A similar task would be to have the Qeditas OCaml code call C functions to do the hashing (sha256 and ripemd160). There must be open source C implementations of these hashing functions, and I suspect calling C versions instead of the current OCaml versions would significantly improve performance.