immutable* vs immutable

Tate Berenbaum — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 19:46:30 +0000

intro

Hey everybody!

Lots has been happening in the nest.land community lately. We have a lot of exciting announcements to make in the next few days/weeks, so stay tuned!

The team wanted to write a short article addressing some concerns with the misuse of the word "immutable." This is an extremely common misconception by members of various development communities, and we feel that it must be appropriately addressed.

The recent release of a module registry and CDN is now using the term "immutable," while their data is in fact not immutable. That release is now blatantly and falsely demeaning the value of our service to others.

The dictionary definition presents this:

im·mu·ta·ble

/i(m)ˈmyo͞odəb(ə)l/

unchanging over time or unable to be changed.

immutable* vs immutable

We certainly agree with this definition, but it is quite vague for developers. In terms of data, there are two (very different) levels to this word.

Immutability from a user standpoint (Immutable*)
Immutability from a data standpoint (Immutable)

From a user standpoint, immutability refers to being unable to make edits to or take something down. In other words, once something is published or "pushed," a general user cannot make changes to that. An example of a general user is a module publisher.

From a data standpoint, immutability refers to never being able to modify or delete data after it is published somewhere. In other words, no entity (such as Amazon, GitHub, the registry, or module owner) has the ability to take data down after it becomes "immutable."

This second type of data immutability is something that only a blockchain can accomplish, as true decentralization must be in place.

To be truly immutable, the data itself must not exist under a central authority and its servers.

examples

An example of an immutable* service lies with a registry and CDN whose data is served from a centralized source, such as Amazon or GitHub.

An example of a truly immutable service is nest.land, whose data is served straight from the blockweave.

comparison

Immutable*

Data not editable or deletable by a general user once published
- General users are module publishers
Data can be edited or taken down by the entity controlling the data
- In the case of an immutable* module registry, there are now two points of failure:
- The registry could choose to delete data
- Amazon could choose to delete data
Data can be blocked in different regions or countries, as it is only accessible from a single source

Immutable

Data not editable or removable by any entity, including nest.land and module owners/developers.
- Thanks to the blockweave, our data is securely distributed across 347 nodes run by different people and companies from around the world.
- For comparison, Amazon is "designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities"
Data can not be blocked in different regions or countries, as it is accessible from any Arweave gateway.
- Anybody can spin up an Arweave gateway.

Nest.land is also steadily making advancements towards registry immutability to match our CDN immutability. We're currently building Fossil, an automatic registry archiving service to publish the module gallery to Arweave.

Check it out here:
https://github.com/nestdotland/fossil

conclusion

There are two very different levels of the word "immutable." For something to be truly immutable, it must not be editable or deletable by any entity, ever.

Please share this post with others to raise awareness about nest.land and how we're here to help the Deno community with true module immutability.

std. made immutable.

Tate Berenbaum — Sun, 19 Jul 2020 19:34:28 +0000

TL;DR

https://nest.land/std

First, what is nest.land?

Nest.land is an immutable alternative to deno.land/x. All modules published to the platform are uploaded to the Arweave Blockweave, where they can never be modified or deleted. This ensures that any (non-vendored) code you import into your Deno projects is available forever.

Why Deno's Standard Modules?

Our platform already holds over 60 third-party modules and over 20,000 files. We're actively growing and expanding our community, but what would happen in the event of deno.land/std having a temporary outage or shutting down 30+ years from now?

Deno's Standard Modules are a critical piece of the pie. Without these modules, developers would have a very difficult time building Deno applications and using Deno to its full potential.

In light of Deno's love for decentralization, all standard modules have been published to Arweave, where they can be hosted and served from 347 individual nodes and counting.

Before you ask: "Well, what if nest.land goes down? What then???"

We'll be rolling out alternative import urls shortly that import code directly from Arweave's Permaweb Gateway. This way, even if nest.land has an outage, std will not.

Try it out!

Check out https://nest.land/std to see our brand new Standard Module Gallery. You can use this std mirror as an alternative to deno.land/std.

From now on, we'll be publishing each new version of Deno's Standard Modules on nest.land!

Note: Nest.land is not in its 1.0.0 stage yet, so bear with us if you find a bug or something not working as expected. We are actively working to mitigate issues and maintain stability!

Feel free to join our GitHub Discussions or report issues on our repository!

Special thanks:

@lucacasonato
@caspervonb
@ry

#6699

Forem: Tate Berenbaum

immutable* vs immutable

intro

im·mu·ta·ble

immutable* vs immutable

examples

comparison

Immutable*

Immutable

conclusion

std. made immutable.

TL;DR

First, what is nest.land?

Why Deno's Standard Modules?

Try it out!

Special thanks: