Comments on "An experiment with Whisper"

[markspanbroek]

Please leave your comments to An experiment with Whisper here.

[bobsummerwill]

Awesome! Thanks for writing this up.

I think that the rebooted cpp-ethereum is likely to be your best long-term path to something which is workable on iOS in the long-term, though there is a reasonably long TODO list before it gets to where you will need it to be.

Did you ready my recent Ethereum Everywhere blog, which talks about the iOS licensing issue specifically.

Sequence of events ...

• Re-licensing of cpp-ethereum to Apache 2.0 (happening right now)
• Implementation of LES for cpp-ethereum, which I have funding for doing myself at doublethinkco, but which has been backlogged since February on cpp-ethereum homecoming, which will be unblocked this week
• And then the Whisper implementation in cpp-ethereum needs bringing up-to-speed

There are a few similar "features which need doing" in the C++ client, and I am not sure where Whisper is likely to fall in the priority list. We're also going to want fast-sync and Swarm. The good news is that the work on these is highly parallelizable. It's "just work" which somebody needs to do, and there will be existing implementation to copy from in geth.

The permissive relicensing will open up the C++ codebase to such parallel efforts outside of the Ethereum Foundation, because contributors will know that they will be able to use that code in pretty much any execution context, and within proprietary code, or on platforms like iOS which are GPL-incompatible.

[markspanbroek]

@bobsummerwill: thanks for the pointer to the iOS licensing blog post. I'm really glad that you're making the relicensing happening! I have a feeling that it will indeed open up the codebase to more contributors, and it will make the App Store publishing issue go away.

Do you know whether there are already some iOS builds of the cpp-ethereum code? Or maybe some build scripts? I would love to play around with it.

By the way: if we're just talking about using Whisper on iOS then the LES implementation wouldn't strictly be needed. We'd just need a way to tell the Ethereum node to not download the chain data to the phone.

[bobsummerwill]

Do you know whether there are already some iOS builds of the cpp-ethereum code?
Or maybe some build scripts? I would love to play around with it.

Not to my knowledge.

It's on my list for cpp-ethereum-cross, but won't be moving in a hurry. Many other tasks which affect all platforms sitting ahead of that.

If you are willing-and-able to try to progress that, I would be delight to help guide you on how that could be done. It will mainly be a matter of getting the right compiler, etc. hooked up.

By the way: if we're just talking about using Whisper on iOS then the LES implementation
wouldn't strictly be needed. We'd just need a way to tell the Ethereum node to not
download the chain data to the phone.

Yeah - that is a much easier proposition. So running a cpp-ethereum node which is only running SHH protocol, not ETH. Again, if you would like to play around with that (maybe just on Windows, Mac or Linux at first), I would be delighted to help guide that.