Solana Technical

Clear and consistent focus on hardware integration to maximize performance.

Desired outcomes that drive architectural decision making:

Context

Laser focus on data flow and locality:

Modern programming paradigms often hide data flow and locality, which are crucial for performance.
Systems should be designed with data flow in mind from the start.
Locality is critical for high-performance computing.

Resource planning and allocation:

Pre-allocate resources (memory, cores) at job startup rather than relying on dynamic allocation.
Be explicit about resource requirements and limitations.
Avoid using features like malloc that pretend resources are infinite.

Tile architecture:

Assign specific tasks to dedicated cores or "tiles".
This allows for specialization, efficient caching, and deterministic performance.
Provides natural security boundaries between components.

Rethink abstraction layers:

Many modern APIs and operating systems hide important low-level details.
Create abstractions that allow developers to express locality and data flow without needing to understand all low-level details.

Optimize for real-world constraints:

Consider physical limitations like the speed of light.
Design systems with concurrency budgets in mind (number of instruction pointers available).

Encourage proper resource management:

Provide developers with tools and abstractions that naturally lead to good resource allocation practices.
Avoid relying on the operating system or language runtime to magically handle resource management.

Focus on reliability and determinism:

Design systems to be hyper-deterministic and reliable.
This is crucial for financial applications that require quick, consistent responses.

Plan for scale from the beginning:

Existing protocols like QUIC may not be optimal for validator needs.
Consider designing purpose-built protocols for high-performance blockchain systems.

Spend time identifying and specifying all implicit behaviors in the system.
This is crucial for creating a reliable and consistent implementation across different clients.

Token Extensions — aligned focus on delivering customer value by providing native support for enterprise features
Scalability — designed to be the most scalable blockchain for mass adoption
Performance — high speed, low fees, and a single global state machine allowing composability
Hardware optimization — extract maximal benefit from hardware evolution
Blinks and Actions — transaction intents
Ex Qualcomm Engineering — hardware-first thinking

Firedancer is a new validator being developed by Jump Crypto in C language:

Highly optimized for performance with zero technical debt
Will provide true decentralization with a second independent validator implementation