Distributed systems programming has stalled

The article makes great points about why distributed programming has stalled, but I think there's still room for innovation—especially in how we handle state consistency in decentralized systems.

In Freenet[1], we’ve been exploring a novel approach to consistency that avoids the usual trade-offs between strong consistency and availability. Instead of treating state as a single evolving object, we model updates as summarizable deltas—each a commutative monoid—allowing peers to merge state independently in any order while achieving eventual consistency.

This eliminates the need for heavyweight consensus protocols while still ensuring nodes converge on a consistent view of the data. More details here: https://freenet.org/news/summary-delta-sync/

Would love to hear thoughts from others working on similar problems!

[1] https://freenet.org/

Haven't read the post yet (I should, I have been vaguely following y'all along but obviously not close enough!) How is this different from delta-based CRDTs? I've built (admittedly toy) CRDTs as DAGs that ship deltas using lattice operations and it's really not that hard to have it work. There's already CRDT based distributed stores out there. How is this any different?

Good question! Freenet is a decentralized key-value store, but unlike traditional KV stores, the keys are WebAssembly (WASM) contracts. These contracts define not just what values (i.e., data or state) are valid for that key but also when and how the value can be mutated. They also specify how to efficiently synchronize the value across peers using summaries and deltas.

Each contract determines how state changes are validated, summarized, and merged, meaning you can efficiently implement almost any CRDT mechanism in WASM on top of Freenet. Another key difference is that Freenet is an observable KV store, allowing you to subscribe to values and receive immediate updates when they change.

That's really cool, now I have to read this post. Thanks!