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Comment by Sol- | Hacker News Reader

Does the dat:// scheme have any history or did the developers of this Beaker browser invent it? Just curious since I haven't seen the protocol before.

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https://datproject.org/

It's been around for a year or so. I was wondering when it'd make it to HN. It's very nicely done but unfortunately the only implementations are in javascript.

Rust implementation is in the works with grant funding, https://github.com/datrs

I'm not sure Rust is an especially great language for interop purposes or that the productivity will be high enough to keep up with the JavaScript implementation.

If you want to make a library with a C compatible API I'd be tempted to explore SubstrateVM. It can export C symbols to the generated standalone .so / .dll files, maybe you can even reuse some of the JS code, or failing that, a Java/Kotlin implementation would be compiled down to native code or be usable from other scripting languages like Ruby.

It's been around for more than 4 years.

I doubt it. datproject.org was registered two years ago, and their whitepaper was published last year https://github.com/datproject/docs/blob/master/papers/dat-pa...

Where are you getting 4 years from?

It's been almost 5 years at this point somehow!

Check out the first commit: https://github.com/datproject/dat/tree/464679267049899eafa34...

Bit more on the funding history, etc. : https://blog.datproject.org/2017/09/15/dat-funding-history/

I know the people involved and they were definitely working on it (with funding) a long time ago. I remember talking with them about it around the time of the io.js fork which was in 2015. The project was up and running at that point.

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