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Comment by jorangreef | Hacker News Reader

In fact, the Raft paper cites that it was most influenced by VSR:

“Raft is similar in many ways to existing consensus algorithms (most notably, Oki and Liskov’s Viewstamped Replication [29, 22])”

Happy to keep having this conversation, if only to shine a spotlight and pay tribute to some of the (lesser known but nevertheless) pioneers of our field. :)

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I don’t interpret those words that way. I see that as a recognition of the VSR paper, as had been recently highlighted in VSR revisited at the time of publication. I guess you would have to ask the author if VSR had actually influenced his work, it’s certainly possible, but not the inference I would make from that snippet.

The paper references Paxos something like 100 times, versus 3 for VSR. It defines itself as a more understandable alternative to Paxos, so it was certainly influenced both by the existence and relevance of Paxos, and also in opposition to its apparent difficulty.

A good example to illustrate this perhaps is Babbage. He invented the computer first, but nobody using computers today was influenced by him, impressive though his achievements were! Nor would we say that computers are a kind of Babbage “analytical engine”. We say they are a kind of computer.

Ha, as it happens there's documentary evidence online from Diego himself, that he was not influenced by VSR.

https://groups.google.com/g/raft-dev/c/cBNLTZT2q8o

Diego there is only referring to “the VRR paper” (note the double “R”), i.e. specifically the VR “Revisited” paper of Cowling and Liskov in 2012 (not Oki and Liskov’s ‘88 work, which has a different title).

I wish I could share with you some of the anecdotes I’ve been privy to, having dived into the events and personally interviewed some of the people involved.

The history (or total order!) of consensus is fascinating here, almost like a Greek island, but only a few people will ever know it.

Fair enough!

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