BOB 2019 - Philip Kant, Designing Applications with Pluggable Layers Using Polymorphism
Channel: BOB
Date: 2019-04-29

Philip Kant
Designing Applications with Pluggable Layers Using Polymorphism

The flagship product of IOHK is Cardano, the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain hosting the cryptocurrency Ada. Conceptually, the system can be divided into a stack of layers: the networking layer that distributes messages across the nodes, a cryptographic layer to handle signatures, a ledger layer that keeps track of funds and transactions, and in between, orchestrating everything, the consensus layer that implements the PoS protocol and determines how the nodes agree on a sequence of blocks.

All of those layers are the subject of ongoing research and improvement, and we want to retain the ability to replace an individual layer, with minimal changes required on the rest of the system. In order to do that, we keep the consensus layer polymorphic in the types of the other layers. Replacing a layer then amounts to choosing another concrete instantiation.

We show how to use Haskell’s type system to design such a polymorphic consensus layer. Features we use for that are Type Classes, Type Families, Phantom Types, and others.

https://bobkonf.de/2019/kant.html