October was a busy month for us. We managed to successfully host two workshops, where we shared our blockchain knowledge and experience with the next generation of programmers. The first workshop was an offline seminar held at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. The second workshop was held online with students from the University of California, San Diego. Both workshops covered the fundamentals about the Polkadot ecosystem and the attendees even managed to write their first smart contracts using Gear! And although we were busy hosting these educational events, we were still strenuously working on the development of the Gear platform.
In October we wrote our custom Asynchronous Mutex, which allows programs to exclusively lock some data and make sure it is not mutated by other messages while locked. Along with Asynchronous Mutex we wrote Asynchronous RwLock — a reader-writer lock, that allows more fine-grained async data locks.
With the introduction of Revamp gr_wake syscall it became optional to transfer gas. This will enable support for many advanced asynchronous scenarios with data-locking. Previously, gr_wake interrupted the execution of the program. Now the process is no longer interrupted as you can make several wakes with one program. This solution made various async scripts possible to correctly implement Mutex and RwLock.
We enabled claiming of value and gas from messages in the mailbox, and a special mechanism was implemented to offset outstanding value and gas when sending a reply to a message. We also started to use a sandboxed backend in gear-node, which puts code execution into the substrate sandbox execution, which brings parachain compatibility and upgradeability. We even added reference to the current block number that allows time-based logic for programs by adding exec::block_height() syscall to gcore, which helps you find the number of the block in the contract.
Our Medium also got updated and we posted new, interesting articles about Web Assembly and why GEAR uses it.
October was significant not only for us, but also for everyone waiting for Polkadot to announce their parachain auctions. Thus, in anticipation of the auctions, we released an article about it. In November, we are planning to organize more workshops in Russia and in the United States. So, connect with us on our social platforms to stay up to date as there are tons more interesting announcements to come.
https://twitter.com/gear_techs
Best regards,
Gear Team
