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@rob-solana rob-solana released this 14 Sep 22:43
· 10 commits to v0.8 since this release
v0.8.0
77949a4

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

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