Announcing PolkaVM - a new RISC-V based VM for smart contracts (and possibly more!)

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Hi!
Damian from Aleph Zero here.

I wanted to thank you for the amazing job you are doing with this, both on the software development side, and also on the educational side (explaining this to all us noobs :slight_smile: ). I wish I could contribute to the project ā€“ I will definitely go over the issues to see if there is anything I could tackle.

There is one question I have regarding the hypothetical replacement of wasmi by polkaVM as the pallet contracts VM. Currently (and what we expect in the future) on Aleph Zero, the vast majority of blockspace is used by contract calls. What we eventually want to happen, obviously, is that the whole blockspace is used, i.e., all the blocks are filled, at least, say 50%. Then the following becomes a serious consideration:

  1. The transaction weights for contracts execution will be set using benchmarks on a standardized hardware running linux, so with PolkaVM running natively
  2. The non-linux nodes will probably be forced to run a polkaVM interpreter (or maybe use some other tricks), so they will be significantly slower (10x ?).
  3. Consequently, the non-linux nodes will really struggle to keep up with the chain, which will basically make it infeasible to run non-linux nodes.

From what I know, currently there is actually reasonable support for running substrate nodes both on MacOS and Windows. The question is whether this can be preserved, especially for MacOS, as there are actually so many developers using it (maybe not necessarily for running validators, but maybe for local development chains).

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