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Ledger Team Update

· 3 min read
Jared Corduan

High level summary​

I am extremely excited to say that we now have a pull request up which introduces our new versioned CBOR serialization. This was an enormous effort, but it will solve a host of problems that we have had since the Shelley phase. It will take time to properly review it, and we will need to put in a lot of effort to integrate it with the downstream components, but this is a huge milestone. Additionally, we have a new CIP proposing a deprecation cycle for the transaction serialization schemes.

We also have a draft pull request that reworks how deposits are tracked. Users of the system will not notice any difference, but it is a necessary change needed to prepare the way for decentralizing the governance of Cardano.

Finally, we continued to address technical debt. In particular, we continued to make progress on bringing coherency and consistency to the code base with a common naming convention, and improving some error messages.

Lower level summary​

  • We have a pull request up for our new versioned CBOR serialization. When we encounter a problem with our deserializers, it can be very difficult to implement a fix. It is difficult because we can only fix such issues during a hard fork, and leading up to the hard fork we must maintain two serializations for the same type in order to not cause unintended network splitting (the problematic version must be used before the hard fork, and the fixed version is used afterwards). This can be especially tricky with the FromCBOR typeclass, since it is not always easy to search for where all the problematic uses are located. The new versioned CBOR serialization allows us to gracefully handle this transition. See [pull-3138].
  • We proposed a CIP for backwards compatibility of the transaction serialization schemes. See [pull-372].
  • We have draft for the new deposit tracking. This draft is not as memory efficient as the final version will be, but it is a sufficient proof of concept that we can write property tests against, ensuring that we have not changed the semantics. We will optimize after we are sure of the correctness. See [pull-3127].
  • We now provide better support for debugging failed Plutus scripts in an important helper function, named evaluateTransactionExecutionUnits. In particular, it now returns all the information needed to rerun the script with exactly the same arguments. This feature will end up appearing in the CLI and other tools from the Plutus tools team. See [pull-3135].
  • We did a lot more renaming to bring coherency and consistency to the code base. See [pull-3126], [pull-3120], [pull-3118], and [pull-3116].
  • We have added a few things to the ledger repository to make it conform to the Cardano Engineering Handbook See [pull-3139].