Thank you for sharing your thoughts @shawntabrizi. I’ve just stumbled upon your post, and I’m excited to see that some of your ideas, especially 1. Developer Experience: An Alternative to FRAME really resonate with us. This Growth: FRAME + ink! (The Merge) also sounds very interesting.
Actually, I am part of a team that is working on an alternative to FRAME, Gosemble. It aims to provide the core characteristics of what you outlined, plus more:
- Easy to understand and use
- Streamlined building without unnecessary complexity
- Less configurable, containing only the most necessary options
- Provides all the core primitives
- Compatible with Polkadot-sdk/FRAME
We have been thinking of providing something like presets, based on the Gosemble, but configured in a way that is more suitable for specific use cases, which seems similar to what you suggested (targeted toward simplifying specific ecosystem objectives (cross chain transfers, defi, multi-token systems, smart contracts, etc…))
Some other goals we are trying to achieve include:
- Making the ecosystem more accessible to other languages / technologies / developers, since we see Polkadot as more abstract and not bound to any specific technology
- Helping formalize the specification, which currently is strongly influenced by
Polkadot-sdk/Rustand is missing a lot of details regarding the runtime - Protocol improvement/development is mainly focused around
Polkadot-sdk/Rust, but perhaps we can use Gosemble as a tool to quickly prototype and test out new ideas, including our own or those from the RFCs
I hope we can collaborate on this to identify what is worth implementing, so it is most beneficial for the ecosystem. There is a separate thread on the forum where we could discuss it and potential features that could be implemented in Gosemble. I am interested to see what you think about this.