NOTE: This document is OUTDATED and will be rewritten at some point in time. For the moment please refer to our communication channels on information on the state of client development.
The EthereumJS Team, 2020-06-01
Main goal of this project is to develop an Ethereum main net light client as well as a full client with fast-sync support.
The light client shall be developed towards a stage where it is production-ready and
security-audited and therefor fully usable on the main net. It is intended for the
mid-term future that the light client can also be used in a browser context. This can
be thought along on a sideline though, during development it is sufficient to stay in a Node.js
context.
There are some uncertainties around the intended development stage of the full client regarding performance and questions how to deal with the lack of (historical) fork-rule support of the underlying VM implementation. Full client support shall therefor be brought to an EXPERIMENTAL stage where it is possible to sync the main chain up to a post-Byzantium state and then process transactions and store the results. This will already be valuable for experimentation and testing purposes. Where and if to proceed from there will be decided in a later stage.
It is very probable that the Constantinople hardfork (EIP) will happen alongside the development of this library. Also Casper, the (hybrid) PoS switch (EIP) of the Ethereum network is more-or-less specified out and will come as a separete hardfork. Compatibility with these two HFs should be though along library development to be future-ready, parts of this will take place independently in other libraries (e.g. the VM) though.
ethereumjs-client will be classical main chain implementation - py-EVM is maybe the most appropriate project to compare with here - and there won't be too much room
for additional experimentation or further-going feature requests at least during the first development
period.
There are two noteworthy exceptions from this base line:
libp2p: There has been a lot of expressed interest in libp2p support for client
communications in the past by various parts of the community. If there is enough capacity this can
be investigated on a side track during client development and implemented in a modular
way as an alternative to the classic devp2p
networking communication.
sharding: It is possible to implement aspects of sharding specification along the way. Be aware though that this is still subject to heavy change and should also be added in ways not hindering the main net client development. This is also limited to the main chain parts of sharding, so e.g. developing a stateless client will be another separate project (where there is definitely a need for, so if you want to go more into research, pick up on this one! :-)).
The project will go through the following development stages:
CONCEPTION
This is the project start and will mainly be done by the initiator of the project (HolgerD77). During this period the various tasks will be worked out in the form of issues down to a granularity-level where they are implementable by various independent contributors. A project plan will be layed out grouping the tasks and showing work dependencies and giving an overall impression what has to be done to successfully finish the project. There will be also an informal description (this document :-)) of the organizational parts of the project.
Goals: A task list and project plan for discussion
Duration: 3-4 weeks
How to contribute: This is not yet the time for contributing. Please be patient for another week or two until we have something to discuss.
CONCEPT ANALYSIS / EARLY DEVELOPMENT
This is the time to discuss the way the project is conceptualized and the way the project plan is layed out. Feel free to join! It will be especially valuable if you deep-dive into the various issues and have a look at questions like:
- Is this way to implement stuff realistic/can it be working?
- Is the new module well-placed within the overall structural architecture?
- Does the scope of module responsibilities make sense?
- Is there already some library which does this work, are the external libs/devs proposed adequate?
- ...
At the end we will hopefully have a work plan everyone is happy with and which serves as a solid basis for implementation.
You can also carefully start development on some commonly agreed stuff. Put some extra emphasis on communication though and announce and eventually discuss your work, so that we don't pre-early lay path we later may have to revert.
Goals: A task list and project plan for implementation / some first development progress
Duration: 4-5 weeks
How to contribute: YEAH, YEAH, contribute now!! :-) Feel free to join the discussion or do some early development.
IN DEVELOPMENT
Oh my, now there really is some work to be done. The main scope of work tasks and the directions where to head should be worked out now. Feel free to grab an issue you want to work on. Many issues will be (hopefully :-)) in a dependency-order-line, so start with issues which doesn't depend on other unfinished issues.
If you have chosen your issue please drop a note on the issue page that you will start working on the issue. If you plan to do your implementation in another way as described in the issue please present your idea there first so there won't be any conflicts/unnecessary discussions later on merging.
Goals:: All aspects/components of both the light and the full client implementation should be
in a workable state. A MVP (Minimum Viable Product) containing all the functionality in a
working state should be released.
Duration: 4-6+ months
How to contribute: Grab yourself an issue and start hacking (after reading the above :-))
PRE-ALPHA
Oh my oh my. This is still a bit far away. But we should finally come to a point where we can actually release some stuff.
Duration: 2-3+ months
Further release stages to be determined.
Since capacity of current EthereumJS developers is limited and we cannot understand all the needs from the community this project will generally be conceptualized as a community project and we hope from contributions from various sides and heterogenuous backgrounds. This will generally a really exciting project to work on. There will be an ongoing project management and coordination provided by HolgerD77 who is working for the foundation as a Javascript developer and has been deep insights of the JS implementations of the VM, the networking communication layer and most of the other parts.
If you are an organization or a company being a part of the Ethereum ecosystem, consider giving interested developers some free time to work on this. If you are a developer ask your company or org if they want support you with contributing. You are of course also very welcome as a single/independent developer!
This is an inclusive project and everyone is invited to join regardless of gender, race, religion, philosophy, ethnic origin, age, physical ability or sexual orientation.
TEAM STRUCTURE
There are two stages of team-coupling :-) which come with different permissions on GitHub:
Contributor: You can always contribute to the project. Just do a PR from your own fork with the added commits containing your work.
Team Member: After you have proven that you more-or-less know what you are doing :-), can communicate about your stuff and have done some meaningful contributions you can become a member of the team with full repository read/write access. There also needs to be some consensus from the current team members on when/how the team is expanded. It is expected from team members that they commit to the project for some reasonable amount of time (2+ months).