Vara Network, the Layer1 built using the Substrate framework, has released details of its latest testnet. A raft of new improvements have been specified that will make the forthcoming testnet smoother and equipped with subtle fixes that should simplify program creation and dapp deployment.
The majority, if not all, of the upgrades to Vara’s stable testnet will be beyond the comprehension of the average user, but developers with experience of working in Rust will grasp the benefits they confer. Vara has listed the most important upgrades to its testnet, but the full list, including bug fixes, is extensive.
Vara Steps Things Up a Notch
The optimization of Vara’s testnet is a crucial stage that will support a much larger goal: to launch a highly scalable Layer1 network that can host multitudes of dapps, with no trade-offs in terms of fees, security, or throughput. To achieve this, there’s much work to be done on the testnet, where bugs are to be squashed, stability ensured, and new features added.
Most of the improvements being incorporated into the latest build of Vara’s stable testnet concern smart contracts. The team developing Vara Network have been largely focused on incorporating features that make it easier to run programs and to debug them when issues are encountered. Chief among these is the introduction of automatic replies from programs.
As the Vara team explains in a blog post outlining the testnet changes, “With this new update, your active program will always send a reply to an incoming message, even if its execution encounters a hiccup.” Devs working on the Vara testnet are also now relieved of adding in boilerplate code over and over thanks to a new autogenerated metahash function.
Small Changes That Make a Big Difference
Many of the upgrades to Vara’s new testnet may seem slight, but combined they make for a significant improvement to the current iteration. There’s a new reply deposit feature, enabling devs to provide a gas deposit from the current message to handle a future reply message. The async send functions also benefit from a new deposit argument, which Vara is billing “a game-changing improvement.”
The status code retrieval in functions that handle replies or signals has also been improved and it’s now much easier to restart paused programs thanks to new extrinsics for program reactivation. The msg::origin function has been removed from gstd for security purposes, as has the obsolete delay argument which is no longer contained within function signatures related to sending replies.
One of the biggest improvements to Vara’s latest testnet is the enhancement to the metadata file format supported. It will now accommodate multiple languages aside from Rust. Finally, the Vara team has made numerous bug fixes that should improve the running of dapps and contracts deployed on its testnet. All told, these changes should bring the testnet to a state much closer to that resembling the mainnet, whose deployment looms closer.
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