Consider replacing with stardust? (I've rewritten ws-star, and this time it's good)

[mkg20001]

I've been working on a complete rewrite of ws-star

https://github.com/mkg20001/js-libp2p-stardust

This project, among other things:

• ...solves the memory leaks
• ...doesn't make the client sign arbitrary data
• ...is faster as it's no longer using socket.io
• ...completely and reliably works! 🎉

Note that while the code works, the APIs currently don't perfectly match those of the interface-transport spec because I literally "just made this"

I'd appreciate feedback and would like to see ws-star replaced with that. (After all I made this mess here so I might just clean it up as well)

[lidel]

The key pain point end users had with ws-star was "suiciding js-ipfs startup if any of ws-star servers is down". Does the rewrite plan to address that?

[jacobheun]

I will go through stardust either later today or tomorrow and put together some notes.

@lidel, we've got a ticket together for interface-transport to resolve the startup suicide for all transports. Some context over at #61 (comment). I'd like to get that done in the coming weeks. Once we have that, we'll be able to enforce it everywhere, including stardust once it's integrated with interface-transport.

[mkg20001]

The key pain point end users had with ws-star was "suiciding js-ipfs startup if any of ws-star servers is down". Does the rewrite plan to address that?

Kinda. I just hacked in a tiny change that allows passing a softFail: true option to make it silently ignore any failures during listening

But it also solves another bunch of problems:

• ws-star wasn't really doing back-pressure to stop the relay server from getting flodded with packets to deliver
• also using socket.io for muxing propably isn't a good idea (especially since it was a pull-stream rewrite of some part of a tool that I've written a long time ago before my code was actually anything close to "sane and stable")

[mkg20001]

Another thing: Can I move this thing to the libp2p org?

[mkg20001]

Note that currently stardust is using the p2p-websocket-star addresses. It would make sense to add p2p-stardust addresses. libp2p/js-libp2p-stardust#3
Would anyone from multiformats mind doing that?

[mkg20001]

Btw here is the roadmap to v0.1.0: libp2p/js-libp2p-stardust#1

Feel free to comment if something is missing

[jacobheun]

@mkg20001 I've gone through stardust and overall it's much easier to digest, it would be great to get that replacing websocket-star. I didn't do a thorough code review since that can probably wait till it's about ready to go.

In looking to replace websocket-star, it seems like right now you're looking to deprecate this in favor of stardust. Would it be better to just replace the code here? We'd want everyone to transition over, but the upgrade path looks like it will be pretty easy. What were your thoughts on making it a different module?

[mkg20001]

@jacobheun Mainly the fact that this is something completely new that in no way has any relation to the current ws-star protocol, aside from the functionality it provides.

ws-star is a socket.io based non-caching sort-of-but-not-really event-based muxer-disaster

stardust is a ws+multistream+protobuf based protocol that runs over an existing muxer and reuses some of libp2p's concepts in the microswitch sub-module it provides (it's kept simple for reasons of performance)

Effectively 0% of what currently is stardust was copied from ws-star, which also means that no smooth upgrade path is there (ok, not really 0%, this part - 6 lines was copied 😄 )

The reason for making them separate modules is to make the upgrades as smooth as possible: My idea would be to add stardust to the current js-ipfs, then warn everyone that they should switch to stardust ASAP and then completely get rid of ws-star in the next major version

[jacobheun]

@mkg20001 that sounds reasonable to me. We could also deploy an update to the rendezvous server with a warning message about it going away once we have a better idea of a target date for that, in addition to other warnings that people are more likely to see.

👍 for moving stardust under libp2p.

[mkg20001]

+1 for moving stardust under libp2p.

🎉 https://github.com/libp2p/js-libp2p-stardust

I've made myself the lead maintainer for this project for now. @libp2p/javascript-team Is this okay?

Also: I'll take some time this weekend to polish stardust. Should be ready soon