forked from Telodendria/Telodendria
110 lines
5.9 KiB
Markdown
110 lines
5.9 KiB
Markdown
# Rationale
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This document seeks to answer the question of "why Telodendria?" from
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a technical perspective by comparing it to existing Matrix homservers.
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Telodendria is written entirely from scratch in ANSI C. It is designed
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to be lightweight, simple, and functional. Telodendria differentiates
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itself from other homeserver implementations because it:
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- Is written C, a stable, low-level programming language with a long
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history, low build and runtime overhead, and wide compatibility.
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- Is written with minimalism as a primary design goal. Whenever possible
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and practical, no third-party libraries are pulled into the code.
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Everything Telodnedria needs is custom written. As a result, Telodendria
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depends only on a standard C compiler and a POSIX C library to be
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built, both of which should come with any good Unix-style operating
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system already, which means you shouldn't have to install anything
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additional to use Telodendria.
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- Uses a flat-file directory structure to store data instead of a
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real database. This has a number of advantages:
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- It make setup and mainenance much easier.
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- It allows Telodendria to run on systems with fewer resources.
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- Is packaged as a single small, statically-linked and highly-optimized
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binary that can be run just about anywhere. It is designed to be
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extremely easy to set up and consume as few resources as possible.
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- Is permissively licensed. Telodendria is licensed under a modified
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MIT license, which imposes very few restrictions on what you can do
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with it.
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## What about [Conduit](https://conduit.rs)?
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At this point, you may be wondering why one would prefer Telodendria
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over Conduit, a Matrix homeserver that could also say pretty much
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everything this document has said so far. After all, Conduit is older
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and thus better established, and written in Rust, a Memory Safe™
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programming language.
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In this section, we will discuss some additional advantages of
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Telodendria that Conduit lacks.
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### Small Dependency Chain
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Conduit's dependency chain is quite large. What this means is that
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Conduit depends on a lot of code that it does not control, making it
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vulnerable to supply chain attacks. A problem with Rust Crates
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is that they are developer-published, so they don't go through any sort
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of auditing process like a Debian package would, for example.
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If any one of the dependencies is
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hijacked or otherwise compromised, then Conduit itself is compromised
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and it is likely that this would go unnoticed for quite a while. While
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one could argue that this is extremely unlikely to happen, sometimes you
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just don't want to take that risk, especially not if you're deploying a
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Matrix homeserver, likely for the purpose of secure, private chat.
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Telodendria doesn't pull in any packages from developer repositories, so
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the risk of supply chain attacks is much lower. It
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only uses its own code and code provided by the operating system it is running
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on, which has been vetted by a large number of developers and can be trusted
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due to the sheer scope of an operating system. A supply chain attack against
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Telodendria would be a supply chain attack against the entire operating system;
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at that point, end users have much bigger problems.
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Minimal dependencies doesn't only mitigate supply chain attacks. It also makes
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maintenance much easier. Telodendria can spend more time writing code than
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Conduit because Conduit developers have to ensure dependencies stay up to date and
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when they inevitably break things, Conduit must pause development to fix those.
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Telodendria doesn't suffer from this problem: because most of the code is developed
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along side of Telodendria, it can remain as stable or become as volatile as the
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developers choose. Additionally, because Telodendria is so low-level, the code on
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which it depends is extremely unlikely to be changed in any significant way,
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since so many other programs depend on that code.
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### Standardized
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Conduit is written in Rust, which has no formal standard. This makes it less than
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ideal for long-lived software projects, because it changes frequently and often
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breaks existing code. Telodendria is written in C, a stable, mature, and standardized
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language that will always compile the same code the same way, making it more
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portable and sustainable for the future because we don't ever have to worry about
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upgrading our toolchain—using standard tools built into most operating systems
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will suffice.
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Because the language in which Telodendria is written never changes, Telodendria can
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continually optimize and improve the code, instead of having to fix breaking changes.
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This ensures that Telodendria's code will last. Rust code becomes obsolete with in a
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few years at best—programs written in Rust last year probably won't compile or run
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properly on the latest Rust toolchain. Telodendria, on the other hand, is written in C89,
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which compiled and ran the same way in 1989 as it does today and will continue to for the
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foreseeable future.
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### Fast Compile Times
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Rust is well-known for taking an extremely long time to compile moderately-sized
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programs. Since a Matrix homeserver is such a large project, the compile times would
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be prohibitively large for rapid development. By writing Telodendria in C, we can take
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advantage of decades worth of compiler optimizations and speed improvements, resulting
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in extremely fast builds.
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### Portable
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One does not typically think of C as more portable than something like Rust, but
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Telodendria is written in such a way that it is. Rust relies on LLVM, which doesn't
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support some strange or exotic architectures in the same way that a specialized C
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compiler for those architectures will. This allows users to run Telodendria on the
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hardware of their choice, even if that hardware is so strange that the modern world
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has totally left it behind.
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Telodendria doesn't just aim at being lightweight and portable, it aims to empower
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people to use common hardware that they already have, even if it is typically thought
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of as underpowered.
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