Where do we stand?

I feel it’s time to start focusing on this repository now. I’d really like to get this done and then ship level as one package to rule them all 😄

But first, lets breath some air into it.

However, I’m unsure of where we stand, like what should be done to make this work well.

Some links:

• https://github.com/Level/level.js/issues/46
• https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs-repo/issues/127

Lets use this issue to summarize what’s needed and which direction we want to take it.

@vweevers @timkuijsten I feel you guys have have been digging around the most in this code and most likely have the most valuable input.

Some questions:

• what is the big problem with the current implementation?
• what are we fixing, except for using latest abstract-leveldown?

[timkuijsten]

@vweevers @timkuijsten I feel you guys have have been digging around the most in this code and most likely have the most valuable input.

At the time I was working on some sort of PouchDB alternative. The motivation to start hacking on level was because the software was a bit unmaintained and could use some love. Hence removing the wrapper, removing unneeded dependencies and updating required dependencies.

I haven’t been closely involved with Node for a while and since I’m trying to move more into system programming I don’t think that will change anytime soon. Feel free to use any of my code if it still makes sense 😉 it’s all released under ISC. Gl guys!

[vweevers]

Because I’m short on time, some quick thoughts:

• I think we should use level.js as the starting point (not the fork), to get clean PRs
• level.js has custom logic for serializing buffers, typed arrays etc. Similar to what we did in memdown, we should strip most of the logic, prefer Buffer over typed arrays, and use _serialize* as the only code path for serialization.
• Before (or in parallel to) the work here we should try and remove process.browser and similar hacks from abstract-leveldown
• Iterators should by default keep reading from the underlying IDB cursor, to fulfill the snapshot guarantee
• Removing idbwrapper is not a must for abstract-leveldown compliance (I think) but idbwrapper has terrible performance so if we can do it, great.

Also maybe I should plan a “levelvacation” 🙂 (meaning a vacation to work on level)