v0.8.1 - Aquila 1

Aquila is a major feature release. We have been hard at work on improving a number of features across the whole of the ledger, etch and machine learning library. The following is a brief overview of the updates that have been incorporated into this release:

Core

• Major enhancements to distributed random beacon implementation
• Consensus mechanism updated and robustness improvements added
• Synergetic contracts now capable of full smart contract feature set
• Much improved transaction synchronisation performance
• Added Kademlia routing into muddle P2P network
• Improved stability of core P2P connection management
• Improved error handling in smart contract execution
• Fix a number of issues with JSON parsing
• Thread and Exception safety improvements

Etch

• Etch multi file support
• Etch improvement error handling on unannotated functions
• Fix issue with inconsistent view of State variables
• VMDataloader and Optimiser reworked to support multiple inputs

Math Library

• Unified interfaces for checking Overflow/NaN/Inf for fixed point and real types
• Begun distinct implementations for safe and unsafe fixed point operations

ML Library

• Example implementation of distributed word2vec training
• Dramatically reduced serialisation footprint for ML Ops
• DNNRegressor implemented
• Constants, Variables, and Placeholders implemented
• Graph compilation stage implemented to allow adding nodes in any order
• Simplified internal Graph trainable nodes management
• Various overflow checks/guards implemented
• Various dataloader refinements
• Apply regularisation refinements

Developer

• Logging system now handles duplicate log messages