[Final Report] Karol Skocik - Final grant report for period July - September 2019

aeternity Foundation Grant Applications
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This report summarizes the work and activity of a grantee Karol Skocik.

July

At the begging of the grant, the focus was on Stratum documentation needed for early adopters.

For a user providing a pool to the miners, a Stratum operator guide helps to configure and operate it.

A user mining for a pool, would need to follow a Stratum client guide .

Stratum in a current form is in alpha state - working, tested, but may be unintuitive in couple aspects and would benefit from more users and reporting metrics to the operator.

Some forum support in this area was needed, but to make it work, it’s best if the early adopters are technically skilled and know Erlang.

Majority of the time during this grant was spent on improving of the AE Naming System, in particular exploring the possibilities how to add Subnames (subdomains) to AENS in a short time.

The original freeze date for features going to be merged before hardfork was end of August, this put in severe limitations on how subdomains could be implemented.

Rest of July was spent familiarizing with AENS codebase and researching ways how to implement subdomains.

August

Most of work on implementation of subdomains happened at this time.

We have found a way how to implement subdomains in a short time, with minimal impact, using just a set membership emulated in Merkle-Patricia Tries: PR 2614

The work requires support for serializing of subdomain ID: PR 8

The writeup about the chosen approach is described in paper: Prototype of subdomains implementation for Aeternity Node

Changing of Naming System registrar (work was merged by Thomas) can be seen here .

Work on pointers restriction showed an approach how to reduce the size of pointers in DB, in case Naming System occupies a lot of space: PR 2684

September

Further improvements to NS happened during September in two areas.

The first is implementation of AENS.update function support in Sophia contracts for AE node: PR 2781

This work requires support in bytecode and Sophia compiler changes as well.

Summarized report with more detail can be found here .

The second change is allowing the name hash to be used for querying of oracle: PR 2797

Summarized report describing this improvement is here .

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Nice writeup. I think I would have liked the structure to be the other way around: areas of work, then in there timeline. But nevertheless, its nice to see how much effort actually was required to get these things done.

I think that the source code of these papers should also be published in that repository. This would make it easier to reference parts of it and help indexing. PDF versions really only make sense if you plan to submit and publish the reports at a workshop or so.

For any of the work results it would also be nice to see a reference to the respective top-level task as this would help to navigate the various PRs.

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Thank you for feedback!
Regarding the source code for the paper - this one in particular (and another one in writing about Garbage collector for account states) is not written in Latex, but I can consider authoring future papers with it, which would result in source code as well.

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