Daml Developer Monthly – May 2021
What’s New
Prefer to listen to this post? Check out Richard’s podcast.
We raised $120m in Series D funding to further our goal of turning disparate silos into synchronized systems and Xpansiv has chosen Daml to scale their new ESG (Environment, Social, and corporate Governance) platform for global commodity markets!
We want feedback on our new Daml Script Exports feature, check out the docs here, and if you have thoughts on what works and what should be improved then hop over to the Features and Bugs section of our forum and make a post.
Jobs
We’re still hiring for many positions including Engineering, Client Experience, Business Development, and Sales. If you even has so much of an inkling that a job is for you then make sure to visit digitalasset.com/careers to apply and share with your network.
Also if you are a member of an underrepresented minority group working in the tech field (or trying to get into it) and want to practice your interviewing skills at a mock interview then please reach out to us.
We were recently at Women Hack NYC. Women Hack holds these events frequently (and virtually) around the world so if you are or know any talented women developers, designers, or product managers then join the event to talk to some of the top tech companies in NYC!
What We’re Reading, Watching, and Attending!
We’ll be (virtually) at Hyperledger Global Forum on June 8-10th. HGF has a jam-packed schedule that you can see here and tickets are available for $50. Also you might want to attend our interactive session comparing UTXO and Account models and make sure to bring your own questions and thoughts!
György recently showed us how Daml can be used as a replacement for Fabric Composer.
As always Richard’s weekly privacy and security news posts are jam packed with interesting stories from the always interesting world of cyber security. These latest ones cover everything from Beavers knocking out internet to the latest battles over privacy.
Shaul has been working on a new video series for conceptualizing Daml, if you’re having trouble wrapping your head around Daml then be sure to bookmark it and check back for new videos!
Quid Agis has an excellent tutorial on testing Daml templates using Script, check it out!
We recently presented “When Daml? Do all smart contracts need to be permissionless and decentralized?” at Hyperledger NYC, you can watch the recording on YouTube.
Community Feature and Bug Reports
Below are the bugs and feature requests that our community members pointed out and are subsequently fixed by all the wonderful teams at DA!
Huw found two bugs, one where contract Ids were going stale, and another where useStreamFetchByKeys was missing the closeHandler argument.
Liam found a bug where an InconsistentKeys error was returned instead of DuplicateKeys.
Quid Agis found a missing instruction in one of our reference apps.
Kirk found an outdated interactive tutorial that we’ve now updated. Whoops!
Michal pointed out some missing code snippets in one of our blog posts.
Daml Connect 1.13 is out!
Daml Connect 1.13 is primarily a usability and bugfix release, but also introduces several features in Early Access for the first time:
- Record Dot Updates in Daml provide a much easier way to manipulate deeply nested data structures.
BigNumeric, a new Daml data type for arbitrary precision arithmetic is now available in Beta.- Daml Script Export is now in Alpha. It’s a tool that allows you to extract data from a live ledger into a Daml Script. Think “SQL Script Exports” for Daml!
- The Enterprise Edition of Daml Connect now has Alpha Oracle Database support for all runtime components. This goes hand-in-hand with a recent Alpha release for the Daml Driver for Oracle Database.
Impact and Migration
This release is almost entirely additive. Its main purpose is to allow you to benefit from recent fixes and try out upcoming features in Early Access.
The only change for which we recommend action is that the InsertOrdMap type in the Scala bindings is now deprecated. This used to be how the Scala Codegen represented the Daml GenMap type. We recommend using the provided Primitive.GenMap type instead.
The full release notes and installation instructions for Daml Connect 1.13.0 can be found here.
What’s Next
- Work on the Early Access features introduced in this and previous releases will continue to bring them to general availability.
- Daml Profiler (Enterprise Edition only)
BigNumeric- Daml Script Export
- Oracle DB Support
- In addition, we are expecting to land two new language features in Beta with one of the next releases:
- Exception handling, which provides try/catch functionality with subtransaction rollbacks.
- Nested record updates, making it easier to change fields in deeply nested records.
- Work on improving the Performance of all Daml integrations continues under the hood.