Idea: amaru in a browser

[jeluard]

Make sure amaru can run smoothly in a browser via WASM compilation.
This can be separate in several steps, namely:

• ledger (at. least an implementation of the store will be required)
• consensus (how to overcome networking limitations)

Similarly an WASI implementation could be investigated.

Note that some investigations have already been made

[yHSJ]

I think it will be unlikely that we achieve a full node in the browser anytime soon. It will likely require significant work that will detract from the work we're doing on getting the node binary ready to go.

But, I do think we'll be able to get pieces of the node to run in the browser, such as the ledger. Notably, a new hire, Will (https://github.com/whankinsiv), at Sundae is getting onboarded to Rust while doing some work on this specifically. Currently, he's working to setup an InMemory implementation of the store so that, eventually, we can run the ledger in the browser.

[jeluard]

Great! @whankinsiv please modify this then :)

[whankinsiv]

I've been working on this the past couple days. So far I have ReadOnlyStore implemented and am now working on TransactionalContext. I will make a draft PR for review once I have more done.

[abailly]

As far as consensus is concerned, the validation part is straightforward if you have an up-to-date ledger: you could validate a stream of blocks, or even implement chain selection inside a browser. The tricky part is definitely the networking which won't work without some form of relaying. There might be some interesting things to do with WebRTC perhaps, or setting up HTTPS gateways over Cardano network using Ogmios maybe?

[jeluard]

Right! Also WebTransport (quic variant) is promising.

[jeluard]

@whankinsiv Given your current work on memory store you might want to look at implementing an indexeddb store. That would be pretty convenient in this context. You can find some js/wasm experiments here.