Qubic status update March 3rd 2019

February turned out to be an even shorter month than it normally already is. First, our previous update was a few days late, and in addition some people finally took some well-deserved vacation days left over from last year. So this will be a shorter status IOTA Qubic update than usual. We’ll quickly go over the sub-projects:

Ict

The focus this month was on speeding up, reducing memory requirements, and stabilizing the core, resulting in the 0.5 release. In addition a great web GUI was created that simplifies administration and configuration of Ict nodes enormously. If you want to know more about Ict, I highly recommend the presentation that Lukas gave at the IOTA Barcelona meetup. His presentation starts at the 30:00 mark, but you will find that the entire video is loaded with lots of interesting IOTA stuff.

IXI

Samuel steadily continued to work on the timestamping.IXI. We’re also currently in the process of hiring someone to help out with IXI modules. We’ve found a good candidate already. Stay tuned.

FPGA

Donald has been investigating some of the hairier corners of the FPGA implementation. His current focus is on trying to solve the the problems that are introduced by the recursive function calls that are necessary to make the Qubic Computation Model work.

Qupla

While building out the Game of Life PoC we encountered a few small hurdles. Nothing serious, but because Qupla is all about making life easier for the programmer there are some rough edges we want to smooth out before releasing the PoC. We are testing and evaluating solutions at the moment and as a happy side effect we found and fixed a few more bugs. As usual we are keeping the known bug count down to zero by fixing any bug as it appears before continuing with anything else. You can’t build on quicksand. You need a solid foundation. The latest version is pretty stable and includes some minor language changes.

Community

Special thanks to our community members lunfardo and hello_world for creating some Qupla code that helped highlight bugs and that gave us some new ideas. As usual ben75 kept his Qupla plug-in for IntelliJ up-to-date with the latest language changes and he also managed to squash bugs as fast as they appeared.