Follow-up on Andre’s code review of Aergo. Revisiting the code on Sep 30 to see how development is going.

Aergo’s got 13 repositories on its github profile. Most interesting are:

1. Aergo — main repo. Here be blockchain.

2. heraj and herajs repositories. Aergo client software.

3. litetree — SQLite fork that allows for branch/merge workflow for sql databases. A real gem, even if yet unpolished.

The rest are forks, snippets, common libraries etc.

#Aergo

There’s a lot more meat on the bones compared to end of August, development is well underway. Github history shows a medium-sized team of developers (15 in total with various level of contribution activity) working on Aergo. A few good-sized commits per day are pushed into this repo, all of them with decent descriptions. Development culture is something you should pay attention to in public projects, Aergo is holding itself okay in that regard. I’d prefer issue tracking to be public too

Aergo still is a skeleton code but the project is taking shape. I’ll show what changed in dpos validation part Andre has been reviewing so you can gauge the progress.

Let’s check out how closely Aergo follows its September roadmap.

Simple dPOS — check, see above

Aergo SQL smart contract (LLVM) — nowhere to be found, sadly

Basic client framework and development environment — check, even if very basic

#heraj

There are two repositories, heraj and herajs. Those are client libraries to interact with aergo blockchain. Development is less active and more erratic in here, with less developers working on it and less code being pushed. Documentation is a bit hectic too. I guess those projects are less important at the moment, main repo taking the point.

Here’s an example of js api, which is, as the team succinctly puts it, “basic” at the moment.

#litetree

That’s the most interesting project of the bunch. It’s a fork of well-used sql database sqlite, but with data branching built-in. It’s well accepted by the developer community, as you can see by whooping 1k+ stars on the repository.

There are two main features that make litetree interesting to developers. First is that it’s blazing fast, twice as fast as original database engine for both read and writes.

Second is that it would allow for branch-diff-merge process for sql-based data, kind of like git flow. Diff and merge are not implemented yet because they are not needed for aergo’s purposes but there’s an active demand for that and litetree developers promised to work on that later.

#Conclusion

Development of aergo ecosystem is well underway, but still seems to be behind the schedule (unless some of the work is taking place in private repository). They’ve got a very interesting sqlite fork going on, litetree. Code culture and development tempo is better than you usually see in fresh blockchain projects. Most interesting parts of the projects are yet to be seen, though: what aergo is showing us currently is essentially yet another blockchain.