Understanding the Significance of this New Release

Particl Desktop 2.4.0 is far from being “just another Particl Desktop update”. In fact, this new update not only applies critical updates to the marketplace codebase, but it also completely changes the codebase of the desktop client application. In other words, over the last few months, Particl Desktop has gone through a full rewrite of its code (more than 80% of the code is getting completely overhauled), a necessary change that is going to allow future updates to be integrated much faster and much more easily.

Why a Full Rewrite?

There is a very important fact about the current Particl Desktop application — it uses the same codebase as it did when it first released in 2017. Since its release, new features, including the marketplace itself, have evolved massively and the need for a more rock-solid foundation became apparent to be prepared for the next innovations and evolution of the Particl Desktop application. And Particl Desktop did its job well, as a cryptocurrency wallet, but over time, the client accumulated what can be referenced to as a “technical debt” as the new features introduced lots of new requirements.

Technical debt is a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer. As with monetary debt, if technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate ‘interest’, making it harder to implement changes. — Wikipedia

Additionally, the development team also planned out, since Particl Desktop’s first mainnet release, a lot of ways that the code could be improved and made better, faster, and stronger. That’s a direct result of working day in and day out on the same application for years and getting very familiar with the various processes that make it up. With the upcoming major changes required on both Particl Desktop and the marketplace codebase by the Infinite Markets and Market Management, it only made sense that the time was ripe to pay off that technical debt.

It helps keep the code clean and makes it tremendously easier to add new, more complex features, without having to risk to break other things while doing it or spend an absurd amount of time trying to “patch it in”. This full re-write of the Desktop application will not only be a benefit to the developers, but will also make the application much smoother to use and will feel much faster and polished. While the general UI will still look somewhat similar, the code holding it together will be dramatically improved.