Advanced Data Layout Dynamic Loading

To make ADLs run, and process your data, there are two problems that need solving:

  1. You have to decide whether to use an ADL on that data, and decide which ADL to use!
  2. You have to have some code that implements that ADL!
    • That's what this page is about.
  • if you used the direct "action route" through signalling, this is a gimme
  • your library should probably have some sort of registry, otherwise
  • language specific "rockets" are common today
  • we hope to have wasm implementations and a common plugin API shared across languages someday -- but that day is not today (developers welcome)

not every application that processes IPLD data will necessarily support your ADLs

  • "running foreign code on somebody else's budget" is not something that happens at unbounded scale on public services
  • availability in many languages/libraries, and authorship/maint effort implied -- it's better to use community-common things if you can
    • similar to codecs in this regard
  • reminder that schemas are usable on public infra (like e.g. on hosted IPLD Explorer tools), because they have predictable computation cost envelopes -- reminder to prefer doing things with a schema rather than an ADL if you can; don't reach for ADLs just because you want a funky fresh custom format

See Open Research Problems: ADL autoexecution.