IPFS IPFS Camp 2022, 31 Oct 2022

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From YouTube: State of IPFS-in-JS - Alex Potsides

Description

Alex will walk us through where IPFS in JS is headed in 2023.

A

Hi uh I'm Alex posides. You may recognize me from talks such as the little elevator pitch downstairs earlier today. I'm, making brain on the internet, um I am on the IP stewards team I maintain JS Lupita P JS ipfs, big chunks of multi-formats, uh basically most of it. If you view some js and there's a bug, it's probably my fault, for which I'm truly sorry um somebody talks about. It was about the state of JS uh sort of the state of ipfs in JS in 2022, um but that encompasses quite a lot of things.

A

So, like you know the elastic ipfs stuff that we heard about earlier. A lot of that is based on JS, so I'm not going to cover that, because there's going to be a deep dive later, which I'm very excited about um how am I going to cover so I'm going to talk uh about what I've done what's been going on for the last year. So all right, that's me, see me on the internet.

A

So ipfs and JS like why? Why would you do this? Why would you do it to yourself louder? Is that better, okay, sorry I thought this thing would amplify me. I didn't realize I had to amplify me as well.

A

um Okay! So yes, why? Why would you do this? Why? Because, because Jess is the most commonly deployed runtime on the entire planet, every single device that I can see in this room can run Js.

A

You know, and the ones I can't see too the ones in your pockets and like everything, this TV is probably, if it's a smart TV, it's probably running JS in it somewhere. I mean that's terrifying, but here we are um you gotta.

A

You gotta meet the developers where they are and there's an awful lot of JS developers out there like 12.4 million JavaScript developers in the world, and each one could be leveled up to be a web 3 developer, and why would you make them learn a new language when they can like they're, already bewildered Enough by all the stuff that we talk about? Let's not make them learn a new language as well. I mean crikey right. Yeah and more than half of developers use JS at some point in their careers.

A

I want to get that big, more bigger, um so yeah, so a little bit of History, so jsibfs started off as a clone of uh what is now called Cubo. If you go backwards in time, far enough, you'll notice that the first commit is actually the exact same one that kibo has um with the same.

A

You know it's one again, the same message and I believe you're in the same hash, I hope the same hash I was going to check it, but then Cuba had like 13 000 commits or something and I'm not going to page back through that, while sitting down there to say so. Maybe my talk isn't 100 factually accurate, but it definitely has the same kind of commit at the start of the history.

A

um But that's that's brought some interesting challenges along the way because, like because uh you know, as Gus pointed out, um the API in uh in Cuba is very much aimed at CLI use and then to speed the development that CLI interface was then uh turned into an RPC interface, with a with a logic, automated process, which has resulted in a interesting RPC API. Just perhaps not like it's very it's great for for, like if you're trying to replicate a CLI um but from from the point of view of an RPC API.

A

Maybe it could be a bit more streamlined, um but we have always tried to replicate that that API in JS ipfs, For, Better or For Worse, um and we kind of realized that, like you know, there are useful bits in the same way that the piece of P was split out of uh Cubo and multi-formats and iPod and all that kind of stuff.

A

The same thing happened with with jsrpfs, um and so we have this like this, this ecosystem of modules that you can you can use in your application and, like you know, it's an interesting thread for the future, because maybe maybe you can be an ipfs without having use of all of these modules. Maybe you can be in ipfs if you just have a small Focus thing that maybe maybe speaks to your use case more than trying to include everything so just hold that in the back of your mind, I'm going to come back to that.

A

Yes, a clicker would be faster Okay, so what's what's been going on so traction, so so it's growing like the use of of ipfs njs is growing. So these are the. This is ibms core.

A

um Sorry, it's not covered it was tested on. The way in uh this is these These are the downloads of ipfs course that we introduced in 2020 and it's it's. It's gone up loving out slightly, but, like you know, it's still, it's still pretty good 11 000 downloads last week. It's quite a lot, I think, um and there are lots of people using it.

A

So so who is using it so, like I, said, elastic ipfs uh use bits of it, so Unix FS um bit swap and and some other bits and pieces which again I'm, not gonna I, don't wanna. My spoilers in this talk uh lodestar lodestar, shipped the typescript version of the ethereum 2 implementation, which is super exciting, so they're using they're using Json P2P.

A

For that- um and you know so- we've had a whole rough of improvements that that make it a more viable, uh a more viable tool to use for, for the kind of things that we want. People to use it for fantastic uh TBD, I love this. um So obviously we all know about webto.

A

We all know about web3, and now people are bored of that they've gone straight to web five, so TBD is building TBD is the um it's the it's, the decentralized finance startup created by Jack from Twitter uh and they're, calling all their stuff web five. So yeah we're totally in web 5 now as well, which is great um I'm. Looking forward to web 17.

A

uh obdb three box, anchor I believe bertie's still using some jsrp verse uh block is another another TBD related thing: um yeah lots of people are using it like this is super exciting super super duper, exciting I'm like we're, we're developing it so, like we've had loads of releases I'm not going to go through everything. There's quite a lot of stuff. Here, um I'd meant to start a timer and I completely forgot, so uh yeah Brendan you're, just gonna, have to wave manically if I go five minutes, I've only done five minutes.

A

I've got 10 minutes left. Is that what you're saying Fab anyway so great so anyway, uh lots of stuff? So so we start with an esm. Refactor, so that was we were dual publishing esm and CGS um some other stuff and, like you, you'll notice that, like gradually, if you go about, you, don't have to read this.

A

Obviously, if you go back to all the release, notes that are on the repo you'll see that we've kind of we've ramped down a little bit on trying to ship new features, so I mean notable things that we did show was like a DHC implementation. Finally, finally, after like five years, I just stick to the people- oh I'd use it, but there's no, there is. There is there's a DHT implementation. It's brilliant! You should use a super good.

A

Please report bugs um we kind of like try to shore up a lot of the foundation, so a lot of the work has shifted to Live Peter p in the last year. um So we shipped uh one thing we should that was quite interesting. Was a typescript refactor, so it's a ground up rewrite everything became typescript um which gives us like way better tooling.

A

It tells us when we're like it's the thing about JavaScript is that it's really tough to do large-scale refactors, because, obviously you don't know what the type of the thing is that you're dealing with. So we've got like it's like you know, we've got this thing that was invented. What in the 70s like typing, and that's great awesome, don't know what took us so long anyway.

A

Here we are, um we shipped that uh and then yeah lots of, like, like dos protection stuff, has gone into Lupita P to make it way harder to um mistreat the nodes because, obviously like particularly for load star like it's a very adversarial Network um and so there's lots of improvements. They've got in there lots of performance stuff as well and then we're trying to like the other thing. The other thread that we've been like trying to follow.

A

Is this connectivity so trying to um uh make it easier to talk to the rest of the network from browsers, because it's great having a DHT?

A

If you then make a query and you get some results back, particularly from the browser, and then you can't connect to one of these nodes as pointless, um so things like web transport, webrtc are going to let you talk directly to um directly to Cuba nodes from from the browser which is very exciting, so web transport has been shipped it's in Cuba right now, you can use it with a bit of custom, configuration uh very exciting okay. So what else? So performance we've been doing a lot of performance work?

A

So this is one thing this is. This is from. This is actually from lodestar. This is the um when they change the typescript implementation of the P2P, so the graph that goes is uh the higher.

A

This is basically it's the um it's the gossip sub heartbeat, so this is when God system has to do all its stuff, so it looks like mesh Pairs and uh like gossips data and like graphs, appears and all that stuff, um and you can see like there's a massive decrease in the amount of time it now takes to run, run the heartbeat. uh So this is fantastic. This is exactly the kind of thing that we were hoping to see, so we fixed loads of like performance issues and memory leaks and that kind of stuff.

A

So if you haven't upgraded, please upgrade uh it's it's very, very exciting, but wait. There's more there's more performance improvements, more more forms Improvement! So here's so this is a. This is a this is a Warcraft, so these stats are not made up. They are absolutely not made up. They are from um every time we run the interop suite for JS ipfs. We we transfer data between, go and JS and then between JS and JS, and then Json go and like all that kind of stuff.

A

uh So this is a logarithmic graph, so that the axis on the bottom is the size of the file. The axis on the side is how long it takes, um and so, as you can see like, obviously it gets goes up as the Falls get bigger, um but you can see that there's definitely some strata- and it's also it's logarithmic, so bear in mind that that the um is probably go to the right. It would actually totally uh diverge. So obviously, it's quite hard to look at so um interesting things in it.

A

So like so, the the um the the circled box and the blue is uh go to go so wouldn't it be great if it was just go like if there's no JS Andrew just go because go is really fast right and JS is really slow. Well, no, actually you can see. It goes actually quite high on that list. So I will carry out that this is running on my laptop um I. Think the story on Linux is slightly different.

A

I think Linux has a better performance than Mac OS does, but you can't go back through all the CI builds for JS ipfs and pull out these stats, um so the the more recent versions are even better. So this is the most recent version of jsrpfs shipped like two days ago: version 65. So you see it's actually the fastest one out of all of these she's like which is great I, mean it's fast. It's really fast.

A

These are, these are great numbers um and, as you can see like I said, this is all the. This is all the versions of ipfs to release them in well, almost the last year, the last four releases, and you can see that it is going faster, every release, we're kind of ratcheting that that performance, so um this is great so also other things. So this is not content Discovery. This is when you know you've connected to appear, and this is just bit swap performance, um but it's good I mean it's really good.

A

You should you should try to use. Look it's it's really fast. It's definitely the takeaway here, and this is the non-algorithmic version, so you can see that the actual it makes a massive difference right. A massive difference.

A

So those are the actual numbers so like uh rubbish uh for 134 Meg file, one single file, it's almost twice as fast use. Js, it's really fast. You know, I made the joke on stage just now, though, like it's a it's a language, that's completely not suited for this kind of thing, but it actually really is. Javascript is really really good at I o and most of what we do is IO, so you should totally use it, but what's next, is it the end of the road because we're about to we're about to?

A

Like you know, I touched on the renaming thing jsibly fast: what's the future I mean it has a future definitely has a future.

A

Like what, if the future is no JS ipfs, what if the features just use the component? So when I think of Jerry's IP address is what I think of so at the very top level we have the ipfs API, so the adcat and all that kind of stuff beneath that you have Unix FS, then you need to you need to create a dag out of unixf objects.

A

You have dag PB and underneath that you have like the networking layers, you have bit swap the P2P, which does all the really gnarly networking and then the Block store itself stores all the blocks but like these are just this is the perfect architecture. It's just boxes and Lawn lines drawn and the nice thing about boxes is you can swap them out for other stuff. So what? If? What? If you know your architecture was not that?

A

What if, like you, just sort some stuff out, so you still have this high level API like adcat, all the file system, stuff and beneath that you have maybe a different file system, not you Nexus. First, what? If you've had like winner, first or whatever, the fs is that you need to get your job done, I mean that would be great. Wouldn't it maybe you wouldn't use uh PB, maybe you'd use taxable.

A

You know you're, probably still going to need bits or maybe I, don't know the P2P S3. But what, if you didn't? What, if you didn't what, if you did something else?

A

What if like you're you know, you just saw Alan, uh giving a little talk about uh other things like separating the reads and the rights and that kind of thing what? If what? If your data still was, actually a car file, you could just Swap all that out, underneath someone's all in from the same interface. This is great so like maybe this is the kind of the kind of thing that you should be building to.

A

Like answer your your specific use case, rather than trying to pull in all this other stuff that you don't need, so that's the roadmap. Basically, so we're gonna we're gonna, rename ipfs. It's not going to try and follow Go's uh development model anymore.

A

um We're going to have individual components that you can pull together, create your thing, nice and lightweight, uh easy to use. Hopefully um a lot smaller we're going to go web first. So we want. We don't want to use node apis, preferably obviously there's still summer node apis for stuff, that's only possible in node, like TCP, and that kind of thing, but for for the most part, it's going to be web first, um smaller, more lightweight, easily composable.

A

But you know we're also going to have an easy way to get started, which is going to be pomegranate, which will have like some sensible defaults, useful transports, but again they're going to prioritize um yeah the browser and talking to uh nodes remotely and that kind of obviously talking to server-side notes and that kind of thing and loads of little P2P improvements that we still want to make. So you should you should constantly Peter P day uh I'm going to be there I'm going to talk about lots of stuff.

A

It's going to be really good fun, but yeah. You can totally Choose Your Own Adventure.

A

uh We need some help. Naming like naming is the worst we're gonna. So much energy is going to be expended on this. It's going to be great. uh This is the this is the issue, so you should pick up your phones right now get that QR code and it will take you to the GitHub issue. With a poll where we're going to decide, you can seize the means of reduction, we're going to decide the name for whatever the next thing is called. Pomegranate is the name at the moment.

A

um I'll tell you why later, uh but I'm not now I'm running out of time, um but it's a temporary name, it's not available in npm, so we can't use it we're going to use something way better, but we want your help to name it. So please, please do grab that QR code.

A

That is it, that's the a that the end, the end of the beginning, like you know, like Brandon, was saying they're. The best times are ahead of us. They definitely are. That's me.