Spent the afternoon digging into what Piecrust actually changes versus plain WASM, figuring it'd mostly be cosmetic. It isn't.
Piecrust replaced the old RuskVM, and it's built around Wasmer, a WASM runtime — but Dusk's own materials say it's fundamentally different in two specific ways: it natively supports ZK operations like SNARK verification right inside the VM, and it handles memory in a completely different way than most blockchain VMs bother with.
That's the part that stuck with me.
You give up the simplicity of a plain, off-the-shelf WASM runtime, and in exchange you get a VM that can natively verify zero-knowledge proofs without routing that work somewhere else entirely.
But hold on, let me be honest about what I actually know versus what I'm guessing. Dusk confirms Piecrust handles memory differently and does ZK natively. What I couldn't find anywhere is an actual measurable performance-delta between old RuskVM and current Piecrust.
Kept coming back to why this matters beyond the technical description — a VM built to natively handle the exact cryptographic work Dusk's whole privacy model runs on isn't some generic pick retrofitted after the fact.
So does building a VM this specialized actually pay off long-term, or does it just make things harder to extend later once requirements shift?
#dusk
$DUSK
@Dusk
Piecrust replaced the old RuskVM, and it's built around Wasmer, a WASM runtime — but Dusk's own materials say it's fundamentally different in two specific ways: it natively supports ZK operations like SNARK verification right inside the VM, and it handles memory in a completely different way than most blockchain VMs bother with.
That's the part that stuck with me.
You give up the simplicity of a plain, off-the-shelf WASM runtime, and in exchange you get a VM that can natively verify zero-knowledge proofs without routing that work somewhere else entirely.
But hold on, let me be honest about what I actually know versus what I'm guessing. Dusk confirms Piecrust handles memory differently and does ZK natively. What I couldn't find anywhere is an actual measurable performance-delta between old RuskVM and current Piecrust.
Kept coming back to why this matters beyond the technical description — a VM built to natively handle the exact cryptographic work Dusk's whole privacy model runs on isn't some generic pick retrofitted after the fact.
So does building a VM this specialized actually pay off long-term, or does it just make things harder to extend later once requirements shift?
#dusk
$DUSK
@Dusk