Weekly summary of Freenet dev meeting - 24th May, 2023

[sanity]

Weekly Development Progress Report

Summary

This week, we had a productive discussion focusing on various aspects of our development progress. The main themes revolved around interfaces, passing contract states, generics, associated types, and our ongoing engagement with our open source community.

Interface Serialization

A large part of the discussion focused on the idea of passing contract states and various parameters in the interfaces. We discussed the possibility of using generics or associated types for this task, but acknowledged the challenges involved, especially when considering serialization and deserialization. The implications of these design decisions could potentially lock us into a specific serialization method.

Contract Friendly Type

To help tackle these complexities, we're considering the creation of a trait we've dubbed as 'Contract Friendly Type'. Developers could implement this trait for objects that have serialization. This approach could simplify the codebase and reduce the amount of generated code. However, we noted potential complications with this approach for contracts written in languages other than Rust. While we believe our current implementation can probably work in other languages, it's acknowledged that it would be complicated to implement contracts in different languages that need to interact with each other.

Development Philosophy

In terms of philosophy, we prefer to prioritize flexibility over ease of use, believing that we can always add layers of usability on top of a flexible base.

Community Engagement

Our matrix channel continues to buzz with activity, with users asking insightful questions and sharing their thoughts on our project. As a team, we agreed to tag each other in any discussions that require our attention.

Pull Requests

We also touched upon a few pending pull requests, emphasizing not to leave these waiting for too long to avoid demotivating contributors. Some of these requests relate to Windows support and documentation updates.