v0.9.1 - Ara 1

Ara is a feature release. We have been hard at work on improving a number of features across the whole of the ledger, etch and machine learning libraries. The following is a brief overview of the updates that have been incorporated into this release:

Core

• Tx Sync improvements
• Manifest support for DKG component
• Security improvements for DKG
• Network routing improvements
• Stability improvements for connections handling
• Storage seek improvements
• Bug fixes Cache storage adapter bug fix
• General stability improvements cross core, consensus and network subsystems

Etch

• Contract payable addresses
• keras-style sequential Model now available for use in smart contracts
• New transaction context / metadata API
• Deprecation and removal of getBlockNumber API
• Various stability improvements and bug fixes

Math Library

• AVX2 vectorisation now supported for fixed point types
• SIMD overflow checks and consistent overflow/infinity/nan handling

ML Library

• Keras-style sequential Models implemented
• Example implementations of mnist, boston housing, and word2vec collective learning
• Model saving/check-pointing implemented
• layer/variable freezing implemented
• many new ops (e.g. squeeze, one-hot, maxpool, avg pool, reduce mean)
• graph trainables internal rework

Developer

• Apple Clang 11 support
• Improved back trace support
• Added storage integrity tool