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Solana’s Firedancer Client – a high-performance implementation of blockchain software built by Jump – was first announced in 2022.
Almost three years later, the project still comes with a training wheel.
It’s such a long time in the Crypto world, so when Firedancer developer Michael McGee joined the LightSpeed podcast this week, I wanted to get a client’s timeline. McGee has drawn extremely difficult engineering tasks. Undocumented codebase is rewritten from scratch, and the original software is constantly upgrading.
“The fact that the product is alive… I think it’s pretty impressive,” McGee said of the fire dancer.
According to McGee, the biggest obstacle to Firedancers right now is conformity issues. Here, McGee says it must be perfectly consistent with the behavior of existing Agave clients under all circumstances. The software is like a “moving target” as the fact that Solana Developer Shop Anza ships a lot of new code makes it even more conforming.
Anza’s proposed Alpenglow at Solana Consensus Rewrite was “the perfect example of something that makes our lives so, very difficult,” and McGee said he personally implemented what he saw as the most historical demonstration of the Firedancer.
Under Alpenglow, there is no longer any proof of history, and all its functions become silent.
In the meantime, Firedancer’s more limited clients have seen an increase in adoption. According to BlockWorks research data, Frankendancers are up to 9.3% of all Sols. We previously reported that validators running Frankendancer are aware of better packed blocks.