Immutable Merkledag

[krl]

"we should start thinking about making Merkledag nodes immutable and having a separate type for changing them"

I'd be interested in having a discussion on this topic, since immutable datastructures is a love of mine. @whyrusleeping could you elaborate?

[whyrusleeping]

My idea is that we control the creation of the merkledag.Node type. and prevent it from being created by a user, then we introduce a type called merkledag.MutableNode (or something less java-ey) that is used for constructing and modifying dags. Doing this will more closely follow the semantics of 'immutable dags' that ipfs really pushes.

[jbenet]

I think:

merkledag.Node  // immutable
merkledag.MutableNode

👍 is a good idea.

(MutableNode is only two words-- not too unidiomatic. if we end up with anything that matches MutableNode(Factory|Abstract)+ though...)

[whyrusleeping]

merkledag.MutableMerkledagNodeFactoryBuilderImpl.GetFactoryBuilderInstance()

[whyrusleeping]

closing this for now... things will change with ipld.