Algorand 2.8.0

Highlights

This is a maintenance release focused around many test improvements and other optimizations. Additionally there are some added improvements, such as:

• Local private network devMode for rapid transaction testing
• Improved support for non-utf-8 data in asset parameter name, unit name, and url fields, through the addition of base64 fields
• Support for CentOS 8 Stream in RPM
• Changes to support future AVM 1.0

Changes

1. REST API
   • New Feature - add handling for non-utf 8 asset names
   • Enhancements
     • Use byte format for asset b64 fields
     • Use dashes in v2 API.
   • Bug Fix - initialize past side effects with correct length during dryrun requests
2. TEAL
   • New Features
     • Selector pseudo-op in support of ABI
     • vFuture: creator access and app_params_get
   • Enhancements
     • Infrastructure to check AVM stack manipulation opcodes better
     • Specs and unit test to avoid forgetting in the future
   • Bug Fixes
     • Addressing panic in assembler
     • Minor change to rename helper function in Extract ops
3. Catchup
   • Enhancement - avoid requesting unsupported blocks by the ensure digest catchup path
   • Bug Fixes
     • Fixes to peer selector and TestBasicCatchpointCatchup
     • Fix potential nil dereferencing
4. Ledger
   • Enhancements
     • Lruaccts write speedup
     • optimize txtail memory consumption
5. Network
   • Enhancement - reduce unneeded contention around checking the peers connectivity
6. Node
   • New Feature - add initial devMode support
   • Bug Fixes
     • Allow to parse ipv6 localhost "[::]:4601"
     • Fix regex for matching charset of valid DNS hosts, add test
7. Logging
   • Enhancement - re-use host ID if present
8. Tests
   • Enhancements
     • Add enums to player permutation tests
     • Add ledger coverage for onlineacct roundlru txtail
     • Implement hello circleci yaml
     • Improve TestMetricSegment test reliability
     • Restore TestPeriodicSync and TestBasicCatchpointCatchup tests.
     • Added benchmark to lruAccounts write function
     • Enable TestPartkeyOnlyRewards on macos
     • Add unit tests for ledger BlockQueue
     • Enable previously disabled TestConfigMigrate unit test
     • Enable unit tests on travis mac build
     • Improve lruaccts benchmark
     • Improve msgp codec testing
     • Improve testing of alloc bounded slices
     • Make TestPeersDownloadFailed and TestHistoricData predictable
     • Move extra page test to e2e_subs
     • Move travis_retry to skip rebuilding
     • Remove deprecated transaction pool e2e tests
     • Use periodicSyncLogger for cleaner test runs
   • Bug Fixes
     • Avoid division by zero during TestBasicCatchpointWriter
     • Fix 10 minute timeout in travis
     • Fix and enable TestNewAccountCanGoOnlineAndParticipate
     • Build: fix travis nightly build failure
     • Fix random failure in TestWebsocketNetworkPrioLimit
     • Fix random failures in TestPeriodicSync
     • Avoid running TestAgreementSynchronous10 on nightly build
     • Ensure deploy_linux_version generates a linux/amd64 binaries for algonet usage
     • Fix gotestsum install
     • Fix telemetry unit tests
     • Lookup in no-GOPATH locations for packages in gocodec testing
9. Other
   • New Features
     • Add Fedora support into install_linux_deps.sh
     • Test conditional slack alert for build status
     • Use golangci-lint
   • Enhancements
     • Update Github engineering template
     • Replace yum-cron with dnf-automatic to support centos 8
     • Run misspell linter with -w flag
     • Specify truncated division is used in TEAL in documentation
     • Typos, grammar, inconsistencies
   • Bug Fixes
     • Add missing txna allowed args to doc and langspec
     • Fix darwin-arm64 builds
     • Fix docker repo update

Protocol Upgrade

This release does not contain a protocol upgrade.

Additional Resources

• Algorand Forum
• Developer Documentation