Diamond Drops (diamond_drops)

WIP on sharding and Ethereum 2.0 with enshrined-in-consensus data availability and Rust: a fast, safe, concurrent and practical programming language

We are working on a sharding implementation for Ethereum with the Rust programming language, which is fast, safe and concurrent. Ethereum can theoretically be used for any kind of economic and governance activity, at lower costs than conventional approaches, in a decentralized, trustless, and censorship-resistant fashion. Sharding plans to scale Ethereum, at first quadratically, then exponentially.

We're implementing sharding according to collaboration with Ethereum research at https://ethresear.ch and other teams, which includes tasks outlined in the projects and issues. In the first phase of the roadmap, we only enshrine data availabilty, without execution, thus abstracting execution, and enabling faster and simpler implementation, with each phase being useful. For further information, please refer to our wiki. The plan is for this codebase to eventually be integrated into the Rust implementation of the EVM, Parity. diamond_drops is used as the name of the cargo crate for compatibility, and so the repo name also follows this.

Contents

• Background
• Install
  • Install dependencies
  • Clone a fork of the repository
  • Follow us on Twitter for release updates
• Usage
  • Build and Run the code
  • Unit and Integration Tests
  • Show Rust Docs
  • View UML Diagram
  • Contibuting guidelines
• Security
• Help support us
• We're looking for more developers
• Why Rust?

Background

For an introduction to Ethereum, see https://ethereum.org/ or https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethereum-introduction. For information on sharding and implementations, refer to here.

Install

Install dependencies

• Install Rust

• Update Rust

  rustup update

• Install Rust Formatter

  rustup component add rustfmt-preview

• Install Cargo-make Task runner and build tool

  cargo install --force cargo-make

• Execute specific task runner flow. Default is Makefile.toml

  cargo make --makefile tasks.toml <TASK_NAME>

Show help menus

• Command help

cd ~/diamond_drops; # you may wish to rename this to dod for convenience
cargo run -- --help

• Sub-command "mode" help

cargo run -- mode --help

Clone a fork of the repository

• Fork the repository https://github.com/Drops-of-Diamond/diamond_drops

• Clone your fork of the repository (replace below with your Github username):

  git clone https://github.com/<USERNAME>/diamond_drops;
  cd diamond_drops

• Add the "upstream" repository to your remotes and show your list of remotes verbosely

  git remote add upstream https://github.com/Drops-of-Diamond/diamond_drops;
  git remote --verbose

• Change from the "master" branch to the "develop" branch to see the latest features that are being integrated but are not officially ready for production

Follow us on Twitter for release updates

Click on the Twitter badge above.

Usage

Build and Run the code

• Proposer Mode

  cargo make p

• Notary Mode

  cargo make n

• Both Proposer and Notary Modes

  cargo make b

• All above

  cargo make all

• All above with collation example

  cargo make all-with-collation

Unit and Integration Tests

• Run all tests (unit and integration tests for main package and libraries)

  cargo make test-all

• Watch all tests (polls continuously for code changes during development, automatically running tests, and reports issues)

  cargo make build;
  cargo install cargo-watch;
  cargo make watch;

Show Rust Docs

cargo make docs

View UML Diagram

• View UML with Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Brave browser

  cargo make uml-default-recommended;
  # The below options will only work for Mac OS X, otherwise use the above.
  cargo make uml-chrome;
  cargo make uml-firefox;
  cargo make uml-brave;

  • On a Mac you can also use ls /Applications; open SVG-COMPATIBLE-APPLICATION ./diagrams/ml.svg.
  • Optionally create a Pull Request to update Makefile.toml or open the diagrams/ml.svg file manually after building with the graphviz dependency for MML or an alternative installed.

Contibuting guidelines

See this wiki article here.

Security

This is WIP, pre-release software. It is planned to be integrated into Parity. There is a lot of research available on security alone; for example, CTRL+F "security" here or search in the pages here

Help support us

Send a donation to jamesray.eth. All contributors will be paid according to their contributions and timesheets, once a grant is received. As an example, my timesheet is available here. A multisig will be used when other developers are contributing full-time.<!omitting until other regular contributors are well established, although I still vouch that contributions will be paid for according to assessing hours on timesheets--our multi-sig wallet at 0x6D446f9545dBC380A6BBDde8A285A7A8030D4381-->

We're looking for more developers

See here for information. There is a lot of work to do in the sharding roadmap.

Why Rust?

After comparing languages such as Rust, C++, Go, Javascript and Python, as well as implementations (e.g. Parity, cppethereum, Go-ethereum, ethereumJS and Py-EVM), Rust is most preferable, while I haven't tried being a user much of other implementations, so I can't comment on a comparison. Rust has advantages such as safety, concurrency, practicality, better memory safety, zero-cost abstractions, and support for functional and imperative-procedural paradigms.