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Rationale
This document seeks to answer the question of "why Telodendria?" from a technical perspective by comparing it to existing Matrix homservers. Telodendria is written entirely from scratch in ANSI C. It is designed to be lightweight, simple, and functional. Telodendria differentiates itself from other homeserver implementations because it:
- Is written C, a stable, low-level programming language with a long history, low build and runtime overhead, and wide compatibility.
- Is written with minimalism as a primary design goal. Whenever possible and practical, no third-party libraries are pulled into the code. Everything Telodnedria needs is custom written. As a result, Telodendria depends only on a standard C compiler and a POSIX C library to be built, both of which should come with any good Unix-style operating system already, which means you shouldn't have to install anything additional to use Telodendria.
- Uses a flat-file directory structure to store data instead of a
real database. This has a number of advantages:
- It make setup and mainenance much easier.
- It allows Telodendria to run on systems with fewer resources.
- Is packaged as a single small, statically-linked and highly-optimized binary that can be run just about anywhere. It is designed to be extremely easy to set up and consume as few resources as possible.
- Is permissively licensed. Telodendria is licensed under a modified MIT license, which imposes very few restrictions on what you can do with it.
What about Conduit?
At this point, you may be wondering why one would prefer Telodendria over Conduit, a Matrix homeserver that could also say pretty much everything this document has said so far. After all, Conduit is older and thus better established, and written in Rust, a Memory Safe™ programming language.
In this section, we will discuss some additional advantages of Telodendria that Conduit lacks.
Small Dependency Chain
TODO: See #30.
Standardized
TODO: See #30.
Portable
TODO: See #30.