Silk, a silky smooth implementation of the Loom specification

Loom is a new achitecture for a high performance blockchain. Its whitepaper boasts a theoretical throughput of 710k transactions per second on a 1 gbps network. The specification is implemented in two git repositories. Reserach is performed in the loom repository. That work drives the Loom specification forward. This repository, on the other hand, aims to implement the specification as-is. We care a great deal about quality, clarity and short learning curve. We avoid the use of unsafe Rust and write tests for everything. Optimizations are only added when corresponding benchmarks are also added that demonstrate real performance boots. We expect the feature set here will always be a ways behind the loom repo, but that this is an implementation you can take to the bank, literally.

Developing

Building

Install rustc, cargo and rustfmt:

$ curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
$ source $HOME/.cargo/env
$ rustup component add rustfmt-preview

Download the source code:

$ git clone https://github.com/loomprotocol/silk.git
$ cd silk

Testing

Run the test suite:

cargo test

Benchmarking

First install the nightly build of rustc. cargo bench requires unstable features:

$ rustup install nightly

Run the benchmarks:

$ cargo +nightly bench --features="unstable"