sventhereturned

Diego from DFINITY here...

I posted this because I am particularly proud of the work by a few teams in both designing/implementing canisters... but also in the simplicity of the piece in explaining what a "canister" is.

Diego from DFINITY here...

I am here to answer any questions people have. In showing BigMap we intended to highlight three things for folks:

1. DEVELOPER EASE - This is a concrete example of what we mean by being able to build "without databases" from the developer's POV. This is an example of how we see the developer experience actually improving from a protocol-based compute with blockchain underneath... this is very counter to people's expectations working with blockchain so we like to say this ;)

2. STORAGE COSTS - We are showing we can host data on-chain (inside the Internet Computer) with costs you would expect from a serverless compute platform. While I cannot speak for ALL projects, it would cost "hundreds of thousands or millions" to store so much data in Ethereum, while only a few dollars in the Internet Computer.

3. UPLOAD TIME - As you can see at timestamp 7:55 (https://youtu.be/ylL4cZG2TiE?t=476) in the demo, Sasa had his canister seed such a large amount of data from within the canister (for the purposes of the demo). In practice, each subnet can receive MBs per second worth of UPDATE calls so it would take minutes to upload hundreds of MBs as he showcased. This is still orders of magnitude of the days (or weeks) it would take in traditional decentralized compute.

Hope that helps!

Hi there! Diego from DFINITY here...

Good question. It is not public yet. We have started opening more in summer 2020 (this post is an example) as things start to line up. Some of the folks in the Languages do give talks Motoko and Wasm... and expect us to open up further.

I do not expect that answer will truly sate your curiosity, and I am very humbled you are even interested to read the code and go deep. That means a lot, thank you.

Hi there! Diego from DFINITY here...

1. Compared to other forms of DECENTRALIZED compute, IC + Motoko shines in making web apps with User experience comparable to centralized providers (AWS, GCP, Azure). Example: You can build simple react web social network and expect quick reads (in milliseconds) and writes (1-3 seconds). Note I did not say "blocks" or "finalization." I deliberately trying not to have a leaky abstraction from the POV of the app developer.

Compared to CENTRALIZED compute, you can create "open internet services" like an open version of TikTok where the control of the app and its features can be be done by (in simple terms) voting. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MkRszZw7hU

More broadly, one of the things that is surprising (it was to me when I joined, and it still is), how much of the cloud stack that developers or compute providers create is not necessary when you have protocol-based compute. As a developer, some things like firewalls, databases, seem less important in enforcing the security and scalability of my apps. I realize as I type this can sound a bit naive AND esoteric... and I think the only way to really show this is by action and folks just playing with it. Few words will really convey this as much as people playing with it directly, I get that.

2. Our compute model are "canisters" which (if you are familiar with actor model) are actors that contain both their code and their state. Actors communicate by sending messages to each other (as actor model implies). Example: I could create a twitter canister. Orthogonal persistance means its state can grow without me spinning up DBs or worrying about replication and consistency.

https://sdk.dfinity.org/docs/language-guide/motoko.html#_ort...

3. Oh boy thats a big question... I don't think I can do better than our founder Dom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dALucsAgAwE

Was that a helpful set of answers?

Disclosure: I work at DFINITY, but not on this team. I can probably answer most questions folks may have...