Roadmap about radicle-alpha HOT 2 OPEN

IPFS, Dat, SSB all have immutable append-only hash-based approaches, but git already does this better than most of them.

But this approach isn't the best for managing state.

State needs to be mutable, and fast.

Can I ask why you never considered GUN? We're faster than many centralized databases, yet completely P2P/decentralized and trustless (cryptographically secure).

from radicle-alpha.

Hi @amark, I'm aware of GUN, it's a cool project!

From our own experiences, and those of others, we learned that the approach of replacing the storage layer of a distributed version control system (DVCS) with the goal of forming a peer-to-peer network yields an inferior experience for interactive use. If you look at a few different DVCSs, you'll notice that they all make very strong assumptions about both their distribution-, as well as their storage model. Conflating both into a storage layer which comes with its own network protocol leaves you with a design which essentially requires you to invent your own DVCS and implement a compatible mapping layer to the existing ones -- this is clearly not a scalable approach, and the merits of doing so are questionable.

What we're doing instead happens at a lower layer, essentially we're simply replacing the transport (and discovery), and tunnel the native protocols over it. This will allow us to take advantage of a lot of optimisations especially git has, and -- hopefully -- to add support for other DVCSs down the road.

That being said, there are still valid use cases for hosting repos on any of those distributed storage systems, including GUN, which can be simplified to: wherever you would be benefitting from a CDN, peer-to-peer storage is becoming a serious alternative.

Hope this answers your question. Happy to continue the conversation, here or over at our Discourse https://radicle.community

from radicle-alpha.