maelstrom VS kaocha

Maelstrom [1], a workbench for learning distributed systems from the creator of Jepsen, includes a simple (model-checked) implementation of Raft and an excellent tutorial on implementing it.

Raft is a simple algorithm, but as others have noted, the original paper includes many correctness details often brushed over in toy implementations. Furthermore, the fallibility of real-world hardware (handling memory/disk corruption and grey failures), the requirements of real-world systems with tight latency SLAs, and a need for things like flexible quorum/dynamic cluster membership make implementing it for production a long and daunting task. The commit history of etcd and hashicorp/raft, likely the two most battle-tested open source implementations of raft that still surface correctness bugs on the regular tell you all you need to know.

The tigerbeetle team talks in detail about the real-world aspects of distributed systems on imperfect hardware/non-abstracted system models, and why they chose viewstamp replication, which predates Paxos but looks more like Raft.

[1]: https://github.com/jepsen-io/maelstrom/

[2]: https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/DE...

I've tried to run the echo example and I'me getting some problems. I assume it works as the same example in the maelstrom's getting started ready (https://github.com/jepsen-io/maelstrom/blob/main/doc/01-getting-ready/index.md).

Love it. Thanks for putting this together! The actual challenges here [0].

Though I'm curious: are these different from the chapters in the Maelstrom documentation [1]? There seems to be a bit of overlap anyway.

[0] https://fly.io/dist-sys/

[1] https://github.com/jepsen-io/maelstrom#documentation

Full-featured test runner: https://github.com/lambdaisland/kaocha

If you install neil (https://github.com/babashka/neil), you can do `neil add test` which will automatically set up cognitect-labs/test-runner in your project. Then you can run tests with `neil test` (just an alias, you don't have to use it).

> I used Kit to bootstrap this project and the way it set up tests doesn't even work, but this was what most people recommended to me for starting a Clojure project

I don't really like the approach that Kit takes and prefer something more opinionated like Biff. I'd love to hear your feedback if you do end up trying out Biff.

run tests using kaocha.

But you can use other test runners, such as https://github.com/lambdaisland/kaocha