go-ipfs 0.4.14 released

go-ipfs 0.4.14 has been released today. Not only have we improved memory and CPU usage but we also managed to fix a lot of bugs, ship a major improvement to IPNS performance and lots of refactoring! \o/

Refactoring

The release took longer than expected due to our refactoring and extracting of our commands library. This refactor had two stages. The first round of the refactor disentangled the commands code from core go-ipfs code, allowing us to move it out into a separate repository. The code was previously very entangled with the go-ipfs codebase and not usable for other projects. The second round of the refactor had the goal of fixing several major issues around streaming outputs, progress bars, and error handling. It also paved the way for us to more easily provide an API over other transports, such as websockets and unix domain sockets. It took a while to flush out all the kinks on such a massive change. We’re pretty sure we’ve got most of them, but if you notice anything weird, please let us know.

IPNS Improvements

Beyond that, we’ve added a new experimental way to use IPNS. With the new pubsub IPNS resolver and publisher, you can subscribe to updates of an IPNS entry, and the owner can publish out changes in real time. With this, IPNS can become nearly instantaneous. To make use of this, simply start your go-ipfs daemon with the --enable-namesys-pubsub option, and all IPNS resolution and publishing will use pubsub. Note that resolving an IPNS name via pubsub without someone publishing it via pubsub will result in a fallback to using the DHT. Please give this a try and let us know how it goes!

Resource Usage Improvements

Memory and CPU usage should see a noticeable improvement in this release. We have spent considerable time fixing excess memory usage throughout the codebase and down into go-libp2p. Fixes in peer tracking, bitswap allocation, pinning, and many other places have brought down both peak and average memory usage. An upgraded hashing library, base58 encoding library, and improved allocation patterns all contribute to overall lower CPU usage across the board.

IPFS Core API

This release also brings the beginning of the go-ipfs ‘Core API’. Once finished, the Core API will be the primary way to interact with go-ipfs using go. Both embedded nodes and nodes accessed over the HTTP API will have the same interface. Stay tuned for future updates and documentation.

Note Regarding Insecure Hash Functions

This release of go-ipfs disallows the usage of insecure hash functions and lengths. go-ipfs does not create these insecure objects for any purpose, but it did allow manually creating them and fetching them from other peers. If you currently have objects using insecure hashes in your local go-ipfs repo, please remove them before updating.

Full Changelog

As always, you can find the full changelog over at ipfs/go-ipfs’s Github repository: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#0414-2018-03-22