forked from lda/telodendria
51 lines
2 KiB
Markdown
51 lines
2 KiB
Markdown
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# 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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**TODO:** See #30.
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### Standardized
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**TODO:** See #30.
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### Portable
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**TODO:** See #30.
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