First of all, thanks a lot for the new Michelson docs, very handy 
Without an intention to start a holy war, are there any thoughts on migrating the economic protocol onto a lower level (and also a common compilation target) like wasm? Could it facilitate a multilanguage development (which is probably a good thing, some networks make this a cornerstone), or not worth it? Could it also ease/speed up interoperability between the shell and the protocol (afaik things weren’t smooth when connecting rust <-> ocaml)?
4 Likes
Nice. What is your view on someone not communicating beforehand and unexpectedly making a significant proposal on chain? Do you think from the perspective of the current core dev teams this would likely be frowned upon?
1 Like
I think adding WASM as an execution target for smart contracts is an interesting choice that probably makes sense. The rest of the industry is moving towards it.
Whether it is feasible (or desirable) to execute the entire economic protocol in WASM is yet to be seen. Most chains that take this approach, such as Polkadot, Near and Solana aren’t multi-language on the protocol level, but rather the economic protocol is written in one language and all future versions are also written in that language.
1 Like
What other blockchain(s) apart from Tezos are you currently researching the most and why? Which features/ideas brought forward by other projects do you consider particularly interesting from the perspective of potentially implementing those into the Tezos protocol?
Whether it is frowned upon or not will probably depend on the proposal itself. I assume that a proposal has more chance to be accepted if it has been discussed with existing protocol developers beforehand though. A big part of protocol development is communication after all.
There was discussion for Smart Contracts from the LIGO team, and more will come later.
For the actual development of the economic protocol, I believe WASM is still far from smooth inter-operability between languages. I believe you can’t just take a bit of Rust, a bit of OCaml, compile both to WASM and make them work smoothly so far.
3 Likes
- If by leadership team you mean me, Adrian and Christopher, our background is pretty diverse. You can take a look at the short bios here on our website. We all have been working in this space for years, driven by many personal interests, and met at our previous job at Tendermint (aka All in Bits). I’m not sure what qualifies someone to be a “hacker” but to the question on functional programming languages, the co-founders have background in FP languages (e.g. the project Juvix was initially a transpiler from Haskell to Michelson) and surprisingly the vast majority of our team members are passionate about FP.
- At the moment we’re only working on the Tezos protocol as core developers. The other projects we’re working on, e.g. Juvix or the Multi-Asset Shielded Pool (Zero Knowledge Proofs) are still in R&D phase. These projects’ timelines have the priority of benefiting the Tezos protocol (in the case of the MASP) or the Tezos ecosystem (in the case of Juvix). To be honest, I don’t know how to answer your question on commitment levels, what is a good metric?
4 Likes
Understandable. Just a thought, however, what if a particular team doesn’t like existing core dev teams and refuses to communicate with them? I completely agree that the social part is not to be neglected in blockchains, it is crucial. Yet decentralization doesn’t imply peace and agreement. It can mean fierce competition. To move a step ahead in my personal view this competition is both required and inevitable. For this reason I believe it will be increasingly important for core dev teams to communicate with the community at large rather than mostly privately between existing core teams.
In total, how many developers (across all the different teams) are there working on the core protocol at the moment?
1 Like
I’m coming from a CS background, specifically within distributed systems and electronic voting systems. I wrote my graduate thesis about building democratic, verifiable and censorship-resistant voting systems on public, decentralised, permission-less and censorship-resistant blockchains.
I prioritise the things that I find technically novel and interesting and that can make a large impact on the real world.
1 Like
Thanks for your reply. I’ve been watching 2018 videos of you appearing deeply dedicated to the Cosmos project. How would you see the current ratio of your commitment between Tezos and Cosmos?
Depending on the metric 20-40 are involved in the core protocol.
Thanks! Now about our beloved updates 
Undoubtedly, you are doing a great job describing protocol/shell changes in a verbose manner in addition to the release notes. However, some things remain behind the scenes (at least it happened once), like the context migration. And the only people who can trace them are indexer writers or guys making side-by-side diff analysis
At the risk of being sent to look in the chain, will there be any critical changes (like changes in the contract scripts) in the context in the upcoming update?
2 Likes
Are you interested in or planning to train more people to become Tezos core developers?
Very much so. I personally think lowering the technical barriers to entry to core dev is crucial for this. I plan to write a post detailing my point of view, as it might not be obvious (including to other core devs).
2 Likes
This is too soon to tell, unfortunately.
Nothing is set in stone for the upcoming update.
1 Like
Ah I see how this is confusing. Back in 2018 we started Cryptium as a validator entity and only I was full time working on it. Cryptium (the R&D Team) working on Tezos Core and other R&D officially started in Q1 2019. Ever since the R&D Team started, our involvement with the network has been limited to operating the validator (as it was already fully setup) and participated in governance.
I understand why folks are confused, we’re working on changing the branding so the validator is differentiated from the R&D Team.
2 Likes
How many coffees / red bulls / arizona ice tea are you drinking a day?
2 Likes
A protocol proposal is currently under development together by Cryptium Labs and Nomadic Labs at https://gitlab.com/cryptiumlabs/tezos/ branch proto-proposal, openly so that anybody can follow it.
Something like 1 red bull per week and 1 arizona per quarter.
1 coffee per month (when I see some fancy coffee in machines, such as crême brûley).
