Ethereum’s Trinity Client Announces ‘Margaret Hamilton’ Alpha

Trinity unveiled the third major alpha release, v0.1.0-alpha.14, for its Python-based Ethereum client, according to the team’s lead architect Piper Merriam in recent reddit and GitHub posts. The release stabilizes the client’s syncing code and establishes a foundation for improved sync performance in the future.

With the alpha, users “can expect a full fast sync to take upwards of 6-12 days on a high end developer laptop.” Although this number may seem high, Merriam indicated that the team plans to significantly reduce sync time, but to do so first required refactoring the code to prioritize fast peer data requests. Now that this has been done, he expects Trinity’s “next release to be more focused on [sync] performance.”

Merriam added that he personally completed a full fast sync of chain and state data, noting, “It is really cool to see the client function end-to-end and keep up with the mainnet chain.”

The client’s recent release is titled “Margaret Hamilton” after the influential computer scientist who worked on the Apollo space mission. Each major alpha from the Trinity team highlights a historically notable woman; v0.1.0-alpha.12 is “Grace Hopper” and v0.1.0-alpha.1 is “Valentina Tereshkova.”

Although Trinity is a relatively new client, Merriam likens it to “more mature” clients Geth and Parity. It is developed and maintained by various members in the Python blockchain crowd: the Ethereum Foundation’s Python team, ConsenSys’ Guilherme Salgado, and others from the broader community.

Although Python is not known as a fast programming language, Merriam believes it exhibits a few important qualities, namely its large and growing community of developers, its low barrier to entry, and its expressiveness. These factors have helped the Trinity team in various ways, like with onboarding developers, major code refactoring, and debugging.

Through its client, the Trinity crew aims to support ongoing Ethereum protocol development. Merriam maintains that many “core protocol development teams use Python, and much of what is being built is done using Py-EVM [Python-Ethereum Virtual Machine] and Trinity.”

The team is currently concerned with sync performance (as represented by v0.1.0-alpha.14), but it plans to introduce other functionalities, such as running as a light server and managing transaction pools.

Daniel Putney is a full-time writer for ETHNews. He received his bachelor’s degree in English writing from the University of Nevada, Reno, where he also studied journalism and queer theory. In his free time, he writes poetry, plays the piano, and fangirls over fictional characters. He lives with his partner, three dogs, and two cats in the middle of nowhere, Nevada.

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