GoShimmer - Sprint Planning Weeks 6-7, 2022

[jonastheis]

GoShimmer - Sprint Planning Weeks 6-7, 2022

This sprint we're focusing more on improving our code and finishing up things from the previous sprint. We're also putting more effort into our task forces to advance concepts so that they are fleshed out and ready to be implemented in the coming weeks.

DAGs visualizer: iotaledger/goshimmer#1648

The DAGs visualizer is our all round tool for visualizing DAGs. Be it Tangle, UTXO-DAG or Branch-DAG or their interactions. The DAGs visualizer is our go-to tool for visualization.

The DAGs Visualizer is about to be merged in #2014. It looks awesome (check this out!) and is going to be an invaluable tool in development, debugging and education. Researchers, developers, community, simply everyone is now able to play around with all three DAGs (Tangle, UTXO DAG, Branch DAG) in real time. We're thinking of preparing some little spammer scripts and some more documentation in order to make it easier to explore their interdependencies. Stay tuned! :)

Merge into Master: iotaledger/goshimmer#1460

Once a branch gets confirmed, we need to mark it as such and all its conflicts as rejected to keep algorithms of the booking process fast, e.g. branch inheritance, propagation of approval weights.

All comments in #1770 have been resolved, unit and integration tests written. We're in the last stages of testing on our feature network. Right now, it seems there are some edge cases where messages are not confirmed when doing heavy conflict spamming. This needs to be investigated.

Tip Fishing: TimeSinceCofirmation of a parent: iotaledger/goshimmer#1766

Tip fishing is our mechanism to enforce correct timestamps: When selecting parents of a new message, check whether there are no invalid timestamps in the past cone of selected parents. Walk the tangle (with the help of markers) to find oldest unconfirmed message in the past cone of the parents and check if the timestamp is valid.

Once the tip fishing is integrated the data flow as depicted here is complete. A first version using markers is already implemented. Currently, this is just waiting for to integrate the upcoming changes by merge to master.

Implement generic serialization: iotaledger/goshimmer#1629

Implement generic serialization/deserialization package using reflection, so that it's not necessary to explicitly implement this for every structure that we want to have serialized. This eases on the one hand development as currently there is some overhead for writing the same stuff manually. On the other hand, it's less prone to errors since serialization/deserialization is done programatically instead of explicitly coded.

Code Cleanup using Generics: iotaledger/goshimmer#2002

Starting with Go 1.18 Beta 1 generics are finally supported in Go! We all have been waiting for this moment and want to go ahead and drastically simplify our code base (cached objects, walkers, general purpose data structures).

Improve developer experience for integration tests: iotaledger/goshimmer#2003

Currently, developing and debugging the integration tests is a time sink and a dreaded task. The tooling and framework is simply not good. We therefore need to make the integration tests better to develop for and debug.