tinygeth

README

Tiny Geth

Tiny Geth is Peter's personal, opinionated "fork" of go-ethereum. It's not a complete fork, rather combined bits and bobs from upstream with some local changes that were rejected upstream. I want to explore what Geth could be with hands untied, without having to care about breaking code for that one developer in Nebraska¹.

Disclaimers:

• This is a personal project. I take no responsibility for anyone using it and incurring arbitrary losses.
• Unless promised personally, there is no API guarantee anywhere in this project, not even on the RPCs.

Binaries

Tiny Geth is only pre-built as a multi-arch docker image for amd64 and arm64 in tinygeth/tinygeth. The tags available are: latest (all pushes to main), stable (latest tagged release) and vX.Y.Z (specific tagged release).

For anything else, you can build with Go:

go install ./cmd/tinygeth

There are no plans to distribute to any other platforms.

Changelog

These are the approximate changes compared upstream:

• Tiny Geth uses a number of upstream packages.
  • There is no point in maintaining the same utility functionality in multiple repositories / forks. Any Go library code that can be reused as a pre-canned chunk of code from upstream, will be done so. These include: accounts/abi, common, crypto, ethdb, log, metrics, p2p, rlp, rpc at the moment.
  • Whilst the above packages are akin to utilities, there are also critical ones that should not be duplicated or maintained separately. These include: consensus, core/state, core/types, core/vm, params, trie, triedb at the moment.
• Tiny Geth does not support account management.
  • Ethereum nodes should not concern themselves with being wallets. Whilst having a wallet implementation in Go is useful (please use go-ethereum as a library), having a keystore inside a running node is not.
• Tiny Geth does not support hashdb and old archive mode.
  • Legacy archive nodes store full MPT proofs for all states, for all blocks. That is prohibitively expensive and there is no point in retaining it. A pathdb archive mechanism may be enabled in the future.
• Tiny Geth uses node.js + ethers for its console.
  • Any JavaScript runtime other than the major ones will always trail behind the specs, usually by years. Using node.js is admittedly a big cannon, but it gets rid one a set of problems an Ethereum node should not care about; and at the same time opens up the door for the modern JavaScript package ecosystem.
  • Details at Tiny Geth JavaScript Console.
• Tiny Geth ships one single monolithic binary.
  • There are many tools that can come in handy when working with an Ethereum node. Anything deemed important or uniquely useful is shipped as a subcommand. Everything else is left for external projects.
  • Details at Tiny Geth Command Line Interface.
• Tiny Geth does not support GraphQL.
  • GraphQL was an honest attempt at accessing Ethereum data lighter. Unfortunately, it turned out to be misplaced inside an Ethereum node. The data representation is tuned for operation, not querying. Serving GraphQL is better done from purpose-built indexers. Nodes should focus on exporting data.
• Tiny Geth does not support pending blocks.
  • The notion of the pending block originated from a time when most of the transactions fit into the next block. Nowadays, with high mempool sizes and private order flows, the pending block became useless.
  • Special caveat, Tiny Geth also does not serve getTransactionCount from the transaction pool (i.e. pending nonces). The reason is the same, it is not reliable. Please track your transactions yourself.
• Tiny Geth does not support JavaScript tracers.
  • JavaScript tracers were an early attempt to allow users to inject their custom EVM tracers into Geth. As runtime costs were too high, native Go tracers were introduced. There's no point in dragging .js along.
• Tiny Geth does not support Ethstats publishing.
  • Ethstats was the original web dashboard for monitoring the Ethereum network and nodes on it. It has been abandoned a long time ago and clients shipped proper metrics collection and dashboards since.

Authorship

Tracking authorship information through git commits from upstream is not possible due to the different code and dependency structure and changes to fundamental types. I'll try to explicitly highlight commits that are merging upstream code downstream into this repo to try and explicitly highlight its origins.

Upstream code sync history:

• 2024.10.31: v1.14.12-unstable-20bf543
• 2024.10.18: v1.14.12-unstable-f32f868

License

This project reuses probably 99.999% code from go-ethereum, some as a dependency, some verbatim. The license is the same as upstream:

• The library (i.e. code outside the cmd folder) is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0.
• The binaries (i.e. code inside the cmd folder) are licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.