As we approach the end of the year, our hectic schedule becomes tighter and tighter.
Last month was a very busy month for the Gear team and it was full of both hard work and celebrations for meeting deadlines and milestones.
Firstly and most importantly, we would like to bring your attention to the technical updates to the Gear platform.
- Tree structures have been valued for (future) gas spending algorithm. It has become a step to a self-consistent gas economy where gas associated with the message is always preserved.
- We restructured Gear`s standard library. gstd_async library was merged into gstd. We provided more modules, separated by their aim: to make refactoring, reviewing, and docs writing easier. gcore provides basic implementations, while gstd contains many comfortable constructors and abilities for interaction.
- We have added exec::block_timestamp function to gstd crate that allows getting the current block timestamp measured in milliseconds since Unix epoch (i.e., since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970). It helps to implement some time-bounded actions in smart contracts.
- We added exit_code syscall and prevented runner error handling loop. New syscall provides for checking the exit code of the received reply. Now, it’s possible to check the exit code of the awaited message to identify if the message was generated from the runner (if some trap occurred during execution) and not from the program. In addition, we fixed a bug related to the handling loop that made the node freeze.
- We optimized demo gas and switched to a new version allocator. This feature enhances our custom user-space allocator with better speed and more efficient memory.
- Now, we store futures with associated wakers to provide correct async runtime logic. Before these changes were implemented, we weren’t supporting the use of futures::FuturesUnordered, futures::Stream for iterating through futures. This allows us to use many comfortable features for interacting with futures, for example, select! and join! macros.
Additionally, we held multiple educational workshops in Russia and the USA.
You can find out more about our workshops and meet-ups on our website, where you can also find some photos and videos from the events.
In November we also concentrated on expanding our community across different countries like Turkey, China and South Korea.
We successfully held 2 AMAs, one with PolkaWarriors and one with PolkaWorld, a live Q&A hosted by Orientusprime, a Turkish crypto influencer and blogger via Twitter, and a live interview with our CEO and Founder Nikolay Volf on the YouTube channel “Problockchain”.
We published various articles on Medium explaining what makes Gear unique and what the benefits of deploying on Gear are, Gear’s use cases, the future importance of the Polkadot network and we also explained what smart contracts are for beginners.
All these articles are great for better understanding Gear, smart contracts and blockchain technology in general.
In December we plan to continue with a series of workshops and AMAs and we plan to update our Wiki, which’ll help our community find out more about Gear and gain a better understanding of what we do and why we do it.
Great things are coming and we cannot wait to share them with you!
Best regards,
Gear Team
