Antlia v0.5.2

Antlia is a major release and brings a number of new and exciting features to the ledger. In particular this release contains the initial versions of our Synergetic Contracts and Proof of Stake consensus. Stay tuned for further exciting developments in these areas.

The following is a brief overview of the updates that have been incorporated into this release:

Core

• Synergetic Contract Prototype
• Initial Proof of Stake implementation
• Initial BLS Random Beacon Prototype (Added in v0.5.2)
• Genesis State File Support
• Improved Transaction Synchronisation Performance
• Improved safety and performance across chain and networking subsystems
• Main chain forward references
• Block timestamps
• Improved fee handling code
• Improved safety of main chain block management
• Fixed sporadic issues startup and recovery
• Fixed issues with network message routing
• Various small improvements and bug fixes

Etch

• Improved arrays now fully supports the methods: append,count, erase, extend, popBack, popBack, popFront, popFront && reverse
• Improved strings now fully support common methods like: find, length, reverse, split, substr && trim
• Improved type support for the abs function
• Improved handling of null references
• Improved handling of break and continue
• Disabled serialisation of null objects.
• Added new object StructuredData that can be used for storing JSON like objects
• Improved interface to state handling objects State and ShardedState state
• Improve serialisation support for complex data types
• Added UInt256 support
• Improved type support for updating SHA256 hashes
• Added support for fixed point types Fixed32 & Fixed64

Math Library

• Various native fixed point trigonometry implementations

ML Library

• Optimisers for Adam, RMSProp, AdaGrad, Momentum, and SGD
• Initial work on Estimator & DNNClassifier for high level wrapping of common ML functionality
• Improved batching efficiency (trailing dimension always batch dimension)
• Example commodity price prediction model inference
• Example math::tensor based word2vec training
• Adding binding and laying groundwork for exposing more of ML library in Etch.

Misc

• Build system will try and use ccache by defaul
• Improved stacktrace support provided by backtrace-cpp
• Clang7 and GCC8 added to supported compiler list
• Improved automation and tooling