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2024-08-23

· 2 min read
Naman Kumar
Naman Kumar
Product Manager

Discord agenda thread

Core Developers discussed the latest proposals to advance Stellar Core in this week's Protocol Meeting.

  1. The proposal for addition of a constructor to Soroban’s flavor of Rust was introduced in a previous protocol meeting (previous meeting), documented in CAP-58. A constructor is a function that will only be executed the first time the contract is created.
  2. In this meeting, Dima discussed the updates made since the last meeting:
    1. Default constructor - if a constructor is not defined explicitly, the contract is treated as if it has a constructor
    2. Semantics of the return value - if the transactions succeeds, it is required to return a valid value
    3. Constructor interaction with custom accounts - custom accounts must be aware of the context that they are authorizing.
  3. Graydon discussed the upgrade to the Wasmi virtual machine, documented in CAP-60. Wasmi works by translating WebAssembly code to to an Internal Representation (IR) and then executing it. The upgrade is impactful in two ways.
    1. Translating from WebAssembly to IR takes longer but the execution of the resulting IR is performant.
    2. The upgrade introduces lazy compilation. Of all functions in a contract, only ones that are called in a given transaction will translated thus reducing both latency and fees.
  4. Jay discussed addition of BLS12-381 cryptographic curve, documented in CAP-59.
    1. Addition of pairing-friendly elliptic curves enables zk-based applications. 11 host functions have been added to expose mapping, pairing, and arithmetic on the BLS12-381 curve.
    2. Examples case of BLS signature verification was presented. It consumed 26M instructions (running natively), which is promising given the per-transaction limit is 100M.
    3. There was general agreement that the interface is the right one as it allows a contract developer to implement a wide variety of use cases. Discussion continues in discord.
    4. Jay requested that developers should build applications against the function and give feedback.