Daml Developer Monthly - April 2021

What's New

The anniversary of Daml's open sourcing ("Daml Day") was just a few days ago so happy Daml Day to our programmers, users, engineers, and all the wonderful folk that make Daml great!

Every quarter we make sure to recognize those users who went above and beyond in making Daml great; and we've just wrapped up our 4th community recognition ceremony, check out the winners and their contributions here! 

Want to skip reading and instead listen to this and earlier editions? Check out Richard’s podcast here.

Jobs

We're still hiring for many positions including Engineering, Client Experience, Business Development, and Sales. If you even has so much of an inkling that a job is for you then make sure to visit digitalasset.com/careers to apply and share with your network.

We spotted a new Daml programming job in the wild from Plexus.

What We're Reading and Watching

Some of DA’s most successful women shared insights on the triumphs and challenges of their careers at our latest DA-Versity webinar.

Ed released two top-notch posts showing us how to manage certificate revocation and harden our PostgreSQL for Daml deployments.

Lakshmi Shastry, Principal Solutions Architect at Brillio walked us through how they are using Daml to optimize clinical trials.

Simon showed us that upgrading smart contracts need not be daunting. His latest blog post demonstrates the Accept-Then-Publish pattern as one solution to this problem.

I started giving “When Daml?” talks which are the spiritual follow-up to “Why Daml?” where I dive deeper into the pros and cons of using private smart contracts (as opposed to those running on public permissionless blockchains). Unfortunately we didn't get a recording of this talk but keep an eye out for future "When Daml?" events.

As always Richard's weekly privacy and security news posts are jam packed with interesting stories from the always interesting world of cyber security.

Community Feature and Bug Reports

Daml Connect 1.12 is out!

• Daml projects can now depend on packages deployed to the target ledger.
• The Daml StdLib contains a new module DA.List.BuiltinOrder, which provides higher-performance versions of several functions in DA.List by using a built-in order rather than user-defined ordering. We observed up to five-fold speedups in benchmarks.
• The Daml assistant now supports the Daml Connect Enterprise Edition (DCEE), which comes with additional features:
  • The DCEE has an Alpha feature to validate and store signatures on command submissions. This provides non-repudiation in cases where the Ledger API is exposed as a service.
  • The DCEE contains a Profiler in Alpha which allows you to extract performance information for Daml interpretation.

The full release notes and installation instructions for Daml Connect 1.12.0 RC can be found here.

What’s Next

• Despite the order of magnitude performance improvements we have already accomplished, this continues to be one of our top priorities. 
• Improved exception handling in Daml is progressing well and expected to land in one of the next Daml-LF versions.
• We are continuing work on several features for the Enterprise Edition of Daml Connect:
  • Working towards a stable release of the profiler for Daml. The profiler helps developers write highly performant Daml code.
  • Oracle DB support throughout the Daml Connect stack in addition to the current PostgreSQL support.
• A new primitive data type in Daml that allows arbitrary precision arithmetic. This will make it much easier to perform accurate numeric tasks in Daml.