Being able to just run code from anywhere on the IC as a distributed app is a panacea for those of us working with the IC. I’ve made the fundamental assumption that it is inherently not possible given the compute pattern the IC uses.
Software written outside the IC makes fundamentally different architectural assumptions. You’ll never be able to run ‘the best’ database out there on the IC because it makes assumptions about linear compute availability and writes its indexers and supporting protocols in a way that requires us to fundamentally rewrite most of the pieces to fit the IC.
Given that most software(outside of known quantity compute tasks) needs to be rearchitected to fit into the IC paradigm I’ve been focusing my time on fundamental architectural pieces that make it easier to write general-purpose programs in the round-based architecture that the IC is going to demand(as compute demand will always outstrip consensus restricted by the speed of light and available bandwidth). Building a “New Internet” likely requires stripping down to the wall studs and not bringing the old bad habits with us.
I’d define my base assumption as: There are very few future universes where IC survives another 40 years, but in almost all of them the software running on it is written in a language and set of frameworks ‘shaped like the Internet Computer’ that were purposely architected for the platform.
Given this assumption, there is far more value in steering the thread of time through this small eye of a needle by focusing on the base infrastructure that makes that possible rather than trying to shove the elephant of everything in cargo, npm, pip, and github through it.
(Don’t despair though as we humans have been in the business of needle threading since we’ve been around…I think we can do it.)
Or maybe more applicable to this thread so far, instead of trying to run express we should be trying to build a web server that cannot violate the cycle limit. This seems easier to do from the ground up rather than refactoring the pieces of express that don’t fit the pattern.(although we should borrow the good ideas liberally…and AI may 100x reduce the time necessary to do this over the next couple of years.).
I’m absolutely ecstatic that teams like Demergent are pushing the envelope and making different assumptions because I’m probably wrong and I want to keep working on the IC even if it surpasses my best guesses. 