Optimizations and Enhancements

The current issues highlighted in the link below are segmented into two parts and will be extended and expanded upon as time goes on:

Enhancements for which are new requests or features which are planned to be developed and integrated and; Optimizations such as automatically starting micro-services so that developers and users do not have to manually start-up each micro-service.

It is important to understand the effort and impact that each optimization and enhancement will have in a set matrix, namely for users (usability and quality of life), technical (network, consensus and the overall ecosystem) and time (effort and the complexity of the solution). Understanding these three verticals allows us to triage and define the progression of an enhancement and optimization “issue” through the life-cycle of development and release.

Notable Update

One of the areas we wanted to touch-base on was the de-coupling of Tor from the network layer. We have concluded that adopting Tor on the network layer this early in development and prior to sufficient testing of the core protocol was a mistake, and exponentially decreased the efficiency and rate of issue identfication and optimisation on the network layer. De-coupling Tor has provided the following benefits:

Enabled investigation of issues which wasn’t readily achievable while running nodes and clients over Tor;

Allowed us to identify errors and enhancements and then come up with solutions to handle timeouts, dead communications and refused connections. (In some areas false-positives were received under certain states etc. …);

Exponentially increase the rate of development (described above);

An overall better networking scope.

While we would prefer to have Tor integrated as soon as possible, as mentioned, we believe this is something Tangram can only take on once known and unknown bugs, enhancements and optimizations have been identified, correctly scoped, researched, developed and released. Once the network is in a consistent state that the community feels comfortable with, R&D will take place in order to identify the best solution for enabling anonymous communication over Tangram’s network. I.e. — Tor, I2P, Katzenpost, etc.

Development Updates

We have now been able to identify bottlenecks and network issues that may otherwise may not have been found, or eventually perhaps; but definitely at a much slower rate. A list of commits related to this release can be found here:

If you are willing, we urge you to take a look at the commits to identify minor and major updates.