109 lines
5.9 KiB
Markdown
109 lines
5.9 KiB
Markdown
# 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](https://conduit.rs)?
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
Conduit's dependency chain is quite large. What this means is that
|
|
Conduit depends on a lot of code that it does not control, making it
|
|
vulnerable to supply chain attacks. A problem with Rust Crates
|
|
is that they are developer-published, so they don't go through any sort
|
|
of auditing process like a Debian package would, for example.
|
|
If any one of the dependencies is
|
|
hijacked or otherwise compromised, then Conduit itself is compromised
|
|
and it is likely that this would go unnoticed for quite a while. While
|
|
one could argue that this is extremely unlikely to happen, sometimes you
|
|
just don't want to take that risk, especially not if you're deploying a
|
|
Matrix homeserver, likely for the purpose of secure, private chat.
|
|
|
|
Telodendria doesn't pull in any packages from developer repositories, so
|
|
the risk of supply chain attacks is much lower. It
|
|
only uses its own code and code provided by the operating system it is running
|
|
on, which has been vetted by a large number of developers and can be trusted
|
|
due to the sheer scope of an operating system. A supply chain attack against
|
|
Telodendria would be a supply chain attack against the entire operating system;
|
|
at that point, end users have much bigger problems.
|
|
|
|
Minimal dependencies doesn't only mitigate supply chain attacks. It also makes
|
|
maintenance much easier. Telodendria can spend more time writing code than
|
|
Conduit because Conduit developers have to ensure dependencies stay up to date and
|
|
when they inevitably break things, Conduit must pause development to fix those.
|
|
Telodendria doesn't suffer from this problem: because most of the code is developed
|
|
along side of Telodendria, it can remain as stable or become as volatile as the
|
|
developers choose. Additionally, because Telodendria is so low-level, the code on
|
|
which it depends is extremely unlikely to be changed in any significant way,
|
|
since so many other programs depend on that code.
|
|
|
|
### Standardized
|
|
|
|
Conduit is written in Rust, which has no formal standard. This makes it less than
|
|
ideal for long-lived software projects, because it changes frequently and often
|
|
breaks existing code. Telodendria is written in C, a stable, mature, and standardized
|
|
language that will always compile the same code the same way, making it more
|
|
portable and sustainable for the future because we don't ever have to worry about
|
|
upgrading our toolchain—using standard tools built into most operating systems
|
|
will suffice.
|
|
|
|
Because the language in which Telodendria is written never changes, Telodendria can
|
|
continually optimize and improve the code, instead of having to fix breaking changes.
|
|
This ensures that Telodendria's code will last. Rust code becomes obsolete with in a
|
|
few years at best—programs written in Rust last year probably won't compile or run
|
|
properly on the latest Rust toolchain. Telodendria, on the other hand, is written in C89,
|
|
which compiled and ran the same way in 1989 as it does today and will continue to for the
|
|
foreseeable future.
|
|
|
|
### Fast Compile Times
|
|
|
|
Rust is well-known for taking an extremely long time to compile moderately-sized
|
|
programs. Since a Matrix homeserver is such a large project, the compile times would
|
|
be prohibitively large for rapid development. By writing Telodendria in C, we can take
|
|
advantage of decades worth of compiler optimizations and speed improvements, resulting
|
|
in extremely fast builds.
|
|
|
|
### Portable
|
|
|
|
One does not typically think of C as more portable than something like Rust, but
|
|
Telodendria is written in such a way that it is. Rust relies on LLVM, which doesn't
|
|
support some strange or exotic architectures in the same way that a specialized C
|
|
compiler for those architectures will. This allows users to run Telodendria on the
|
|
hardware of their choice, even if that hardware is so strange that the modern world
|
|
has totally left it behind.
|
|
|
|
Telodendria doesn't just aim at being lightweight and portable, it aims to empower
|
|
people to use common hardware that they already have, even if it is typically thought
|
|
of as underpowered.
|