Golem GitHub Digest #14: Towards the next major release

Mattias Nystrom -

What’s in store for this Digest?

Hi everyone, welcome to GitHub Digest #14. Since the previous GitHub Digest (#13) we’ve had a number of patch releases. We also concluded the mainnet hackathon and are just about to wrap up 0xHack.

For this GitHub Digest we’ll be covering the work on services and what can be expected for the next major release.

So, what’s in the Golem GitHub?

Since the first Beta and mainnet release of Golem (Yagna), we’ve been working in parallel on:

  1. Patching the release to improve its stability, performance and address some issues that didn’t require backwards compatibility to break. With the latest patch, 0.6.7, we’re at a point of the 0.6.X releases that’s quite stable and a huge list of improvements over the first release.
  2. Working towards the next major release, 0.7.0 and some interesting things to coincide (services!).

As some of the community has noticed, release candidates have been coming out recently for 0.7.0. These aren’t recommended to run for two reasons, they’re unstable and parts aren’t backwards compatible with 0.6.X. This means that tasks will potentially fail and there could be some unexpected behaviour if it’s run and nodes on the two non-compatible releases try to communicate. Until the 0.7.0 version is officially released then the best user experience will be on running the current releases.

As for what’s being worked on for the upcoming release. If you dive a bit into the Golem GitHub you can see two repositories related to services. Yagna service Erigon, formerly Yagna Service Turbo-geth (Turbo-geth was renamed) is a WIP and an initial implementation of runtime for Erigon as a Golem service. Erigon is an implementation of Ethereum (aka "Ethereum client"), on the efficiency frontier, written in Go.

More on services and what’s being worked on related to the upcoming release, Galatea is a Yagna Service Proof-of-concept of long running tasks on Golem which leverages chosen text classifiers. It’s planned to include a Chrome extension. We’ll leave you to analyze! the GitHub text to get a bit of an idea of what Galatea will be about. There will be more updates on Yagna services coming up so stay tuned!

We’ve been working on improving the performance of the Golem Service Bus (GSB). The GSB is a message bus allowing Yagna services to communicate with one another and initially it was quite slow. In recent releases the GSB has had major changes to improve performance of communication which will make for an improve overall requestor experience.

Coming up

Working towards the next major release, we are excited to be making Golem services development become a reality. With application development coming more under light with the stage of the project, we introduced a new category to the GLM Rewards Program “Application Creation and Maintenance”. This is aimed to incentivize development and maintenance of application that will utilize the Golem Network.

Awesome Golem is a project that’s been growing for a while that many in the community would have heard about. In its inception, Awesome Golem had a long-term goal that’s just coming to fruition. We wanted it to eventually join it to the wider Awesome community project where it will become a part of a list of Awesome lists. The purpose of this is to help developers that may never have heard of Golem be able to find it, the list has over 160k stars, +20k forks and +7k watchers. The requirements are quite strict and after carefully going through each of the points, Awesome Golem has been submitted to the wider Awesome project here.

Digest wrap-up!

That’s everything we have for you in GitHub Digest #14. Don’t forget that the Golem GLM Rewards Program is running! The GLM Rewards Program round for May has just finished, later in the week after 0xHack winners are announced, we will cover the awardees of May. To get involved in the program join our Discord chat, share interesting information with the community on Reddit, tag us in interesting conversations on Twitter, or even throw some memes in Telegram. See you in the next GitHub Digest!