Motoko update April 3, 2023
Hey Motoko developers! 👋
Welcome back to the latest Motoko update post! If you happened to miss our previous update you can find the post here. Last time we discussed performance benchmarking of Motoko and the recently released threshold canister. Today, we’re excited to discuss Motoko’s new stable regions and a new ICP certification library! If you want to weigh in on the direction of stable memory developments in Motoko or checkout a new certification library, then keep reading.
Page allocators revamped: stable regions!
@matthewhammer on the languages team has been hard at work on a new feature for Motoko called stable regions. The idea behind this idea (previously called the page allocator) is to allow users to request access to regions of stable memory that are isolated from each other. While this feature will certainly unlock a lot of use cases, one obvious impact of this will be the ability to create stable data structures in Motoko that stores its data in stable memory (think stable maps, buffers, etc.).
Checkout Matthew’s forum post here for more details. And let us know in the comments if you have any questions about the design of this feature as well as any feedback you want to give now to help direct the direction of the development!
ic-certification: a new certification library in Motoko
Thanks to work by @nomeata, we now have a new certification library called ic-certification!
The ic-certification Motoko library implements the Internet Computer’s “certification tree” data structure that underlies the certified assets mechanism, used to validate HTTP responses from canisters and protect them against malicious nodes. It also underlies the canister signatures mechanism, used to let canisters such as the Internet Identity sign requests to the Internet Computer, and can be used to implement application-specific certification of query responses.
The development was funded by an icdevs.org bug bounty.
Check out the library at the mops link above, and send over any feedback you might have to @nomeata!
Till next time!
Keep exploring, and see you guys in two weeks! – DFINITY Languages team