Parity 1.0 is here!

So it has been around 7 weeks since the 0.9 prerelease of Parity, which demonstrated the fastest and lightest fully compliant Ethereum block processing engine available. Now, about a week after expected, I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of Parity 1.0 (perhaps a little surprising given the quality of the snow here on the current Parity team retreat).

As the name suggests, this release is mainly about matching the common features of existing clients. As such it brings all requisite functionality to run a functional Ethereum Homestead node, in particular:

• Fully-compliant Ethereum JSONRPC implementation;
• zero-configuration compatibility with ethminer for easy solo mining;
• full compatibility with geth over key files and CLI options.

In addition, we’ve added a few important features:

• State-trie pruning support, reducing the overall burden on your disk by an order of magnitude;
• Ethereum chain-specification file support, so you can quickly and easily configure and deploy private chains;
• hierarchical mip-mapped log-blooming, for near-instantaneous log querying (~100ms for querying 106 blocks).

It’s completely open source (under the GPL licence), so you can build and hack on it with ease and needs no dependencies outside of Rust’s Cargo; simply clone the repository, cargo build and you’re good to go.

There are binaries for Ubuntu and Docker, as well as Homebrew support for Mac. If there’s enough desire out there for a Windows build, we’ll get to it.

Status

Though the release version is 1.0, this is only to mark that we have achieved our feature goals for the milestone: we still consider this to be beta quality.

For those who care, this follows the Rust compiler release convention, which pipelines releases from master (the unstable development branch) first into beta and then, after a whole additional release cycle, into stable. In this way, we’ll be calling our 1.0.x release “stable” in 6–7 weeks’ time, when we next shunt everything along one.

Civility

With 1.0 out, we’re already busy getting on with Civility, the next release in the Parity series, planned for 6–7 weeks from now. This will be mostly back-end improvements rather than being feature-heavy, so we’ll be putting in substantial efforts for further CPU optimisation and control over memory usage. In addition, it will include:

• A move to a hypervisor-style architecture, with fully process-isolated modules;
• additional API bindings for interacting with the block chain, including for Rust and JSONRPC-over-IPC;
• a revamped chain synchronisation engine.

Additionally, we hope to get it building on both Windows and ARM, unleashing the magic of a low-footprint Ethereum client on the Raspberry Pi.

We also have a few other stretch-goals in case we manage to get all that done sooner than expected, so hopefully there will be one or two Easter eggs in there by the time of release :)

Enjoy!

Originally published at paritytech.io on March 24, 2016.