Damn, right before I closed my laptop for the afternoon I had uncovered a weird bug, which git bisect says is triggered by a trivial commit.
But I really should record myself tracking it down, for my Intro to CLN Development series, so I am having to resist the urge to look at it tonight...
In preparation for onboarding new core lighting developers are preparing a series of videos. So I've been asking ChatGPT about CLN developer features, particularly with comparison with other projects people might be familiar with.
Of course, I compare myself with Linux, but it's interesting to see comparisons against other projects:
**Type-safety**:
OpenBSD High
Bitcoin Core High
Core Lightning Very high for C
Nginx Low
curl Moderate
MySQL Moderate
SQLite Moderate
CLN sits near the top among major C codebases for safety discipline.
**PR Submission**
Core Lightning’s PR flow is unusually strict, slow-moving, and review-heavy compared to most open-source C projects — closer to Bitcoin Core or OpenBSD than to typical GitHub projects.
---
Compared to “average OSS”
Most projects:
Feature-oriented PRs
Informal review
Few required reviewers
Patch squashing common
Tests sometimes optional
Architectural discussion often post-merge
CLN:
Patch-first culture
Pre-merge architectural scrutiny
Extremely high reviewer expectations
Tests are mandatory
Clean, narrative commit history matters
Seriously considering putting two RTX 6000 in my upcoming build machine. Puts the price up an order of magnitude, but truly private AI might be a worthwhile investment.
Never played with GPUs before, so informed thoughts welcome?
The latest (final?) #CLN release candidate fixes a long-standing bug where we could forget UTXO spends when we restart. This explains a variety of bug reports we have seen and been unable to reproduce over the years: the most recurrent being gossipd telling peers about channels which are long closed.
We no longer make this mistake, but we also have to walk back and revisit old UTXOs. We do this while running, but for older nodes (like mine!) that can be a lot of blocks. In fact, and I only vaguely recall this, my node tracks back to block 500 (!) so it's going to take a while.
Of course we remember progress, so you can restart slike normal during this process. Other than higher CPU consumption you shouldn't notice anything.
