fyinalt / smoldot

Alternative client for Substrate-based chains.

Lightweight Substrate and Polkadot client.

Introduction

smoldot is a prototype of an alternative client of Substrate-based chains, including Polkadot.

In order to simplify the code, two main design decisions have been made compared to Substrate:

• No native runtime. The execution time of the wasmtime library is satisfying enough that having a native runtime isn't critical anymore.

• No pluggable architecture. smoldot supports a certain hardcoded list of consensus algorithms, at the moment Babe, Aura, and GrandPa. Support for other algorithms can only be added by modifying the code of smoldot, and it is not possible to plug a custom algorithm from outside.

There exists two clients: the full client and the wasm light node.

The main development focus is currently around the wasm light node. Using https://github.com/polkadot-js/api/ and https://github.com/paritytech/substrate-connect/ (which uses smoldot as an implementation detail), one can easily connect to a chain and interact in a fully trust-less way with it, from JavaScript.

Full client

The full client is a binary similar to the official Polkadot client, and can be tested with cargo run.

Note: The Cargo.toml contains a section [profile.dev] opt-level = 2, and as such cargo run alone should give performances close to the ones in release mode.

The following list is a best-effort list of packages that must be available on the system in order to compile the full node:

• clang or gcc
• pkg-config
• sqlite

The full client is currently a work in progress and doesn't support many features that the official client supports.

Wasm light node

Pre-requisite: in order to run the wasm light node, you must have installed rustup.

The wasm light node can be tested with cd bin/wasm-node/javascript and npm install; npm start. This will compile the smoldot wasm light node and start a WebSocket server capable of answering JSON-RPC requests. You can then navigate to https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=ws%3A%2F%2F127.0.0.1%3A9944 in order to interact with the Westend chain.

Note: The npm start command starts a small JavaScript shim, on top of the wasm light node, that hardcodes the chain to Westend and starts the WebSocket server. The wasm light node itself can connect to a variety of different chains (not only Westend) and doesn't start any server.

The Wasm light node is published on NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@substrate/smoldot-light

Objectives

There exists multiple objectives behind this repository:

• Write a client implementation that is as comprehensive as possible, to make it easier to understand the various components of a Substrate/Polkadot client. A large emphasis is put on documentation.
• Implement a client that is lighter than Substrate, in terms of memory consumption, number of threads, and code size, in order to compile it to WebAssembly and distribute it in webpages.
• Experiment with a new code architecture, to maybe upstream some components to Substrate and Polkadot.