Oct 29, 2024

Libbitcoin isn't just a node, it's a developer toolkit. It has significant public API. The code is intended to document itself, including the behavior of Bitcoin over its history. We don't remove old behavior. New forks are additive, so that they can be disabled/enable by the user/developer. This preserves the history and exposes the behavior. These are significant undertakings in addition to just writing a node, server, or client stack. The script machine is place to learn exactly how Bitcoin works, which few people would ever be able to do using bitcoind, and there are no compromises on performance. In order to get more out of script, we implemented a variant stack, which eliminates state stack type conversions in all standard scripts, and templatized the stack data structure (and compile with both std::vector and std::list), which resolves the quadratic op_roll issue. To simplify maintenance and centralize optimization of hashing functions, we implemented the entire hashing stack from spec in C++ templates, and benchmarked it against bitcoind optimizations. It tends to outperform as a consequence of improved use of compiler auto-vectorization. There's no longer any C code in the library (though we do embed qrencode, which is C). Dropping in SSE, AVX2, and AVX512 was trivial (I don't believe Core has AVX512 yet), and we'll get SNANI and ARM variants added as well, in the same template. These are investments that are starting to pay off. The code has been absurdly reliable, which was not the case in the old days. This has made it possible to keep pushing forward without having to look back as we used to have to do a lot. But it took years to get to this point. We still have a way to go, but people are starting to notice. And that's good, because there needs to be some group that speaks for maintaining the decentralized nature of the design even if it isn't quite ready yet. I have spoken up about these types of design issues for years. But it goes nowhere, which I understand. Code talks, and Cypherpunks write code.