Solana Firedancer dev sheds light on the project’s difficulties

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Solana’s Firedancer client — a high-performance implementation of the blockchain’s software being built by Jump — was first announced in 2022.

Nearly three years later, the project still comes with training wheels.

That’s a very long time in the crypto world, so when Firedancer developer Michael McGee joined me on the Lightspeed podcast this week, I was curious to get his take on the client’s timeline. McGee painted an enormously difficult engineering task: rewriting a poorly documented codebase from scratch while the original software sees constant upgrades.

“The fact that…the product is alive…is, I think, pretty impressive,” McGee said of Firedancer.

Firedancer’s biggest current obstacle is the conformance problem, McGee said, where the validator must perfectly match the existing Agave client’s behavior under all circumstances. Conformance is made harder by the fact that Solana developer shop Anza ships a lot of new code, so the software is something of a “moving target,” McGee said.

Anza’s proposed Solana consensus rewrite, Alpenglow, is a “perfect example of something that makes our life very, very difficult,” McGee said, noting that he had personally implemented what he saw as the best possible proof-of-history implementation into Firedancer.

Under Alpenglow, proof-of-history will go away, making all that work moot.

In the meantime, Firedancer’s more limited client has seen growing adoption. Frankendancer is up to 9.3% of all staked SOL, according to Blockworks Research data. Validators running Frankendancer have noticed better-packed blocks, we reported previously.