mert@mert
solana's current issue is not a design flaw, it's an implementation bug
it is now hitting me that some folks might not understand what we've been trying to say by this for the past week
I'll simplify it (intended for non-technical people)
it is important to make this distinction because implementation errors are usually trivial (they can be swapped out for other implementations) — but design errors are generally serious and more fundamental
so it is important to not mix them up
ok so
when we say the word implementation, we are saying it in the context of a certain design
for example: think of a car
a car's "design" is simply a vehicle with 4 tires and an engine
however, there are many implementations of the car design
for example: BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, F1, Tesla, etc
these all adhere to the same high-level design idea of a car but implement them with varying differences
if a BMW has poor steering in one of its models, we don't say that all cars are flawed — we say the specific model (or implementation) is broken
similarly, Solana is using a networking protocol called QUIC
an implementation of that protocol has certain deficiencies and bugs right now
however, that doesn't mean "Solana" has a design flaw — it means it chose a buggy implementation for this part of its design
i.e., what it needs to do is change one of its tires — not change the vehicle type altogether
(for technical folks: it's the quinn implementation of QUIC that's the issue, not even QUIC itself necessarily)
attached is an image of Richard (one of the core Firedancer engineers) saying that for example, Firedancer's implementation does not suffer from the same issues
(note: this is not the only issue on Solana, there are also economic factors you need to consider for the long term, but this is the biggest fire rn — once this is fixed, tweaking local fee markets and economic incentives can be reasoned about more clearly)
