A proposal to set requirements for independent Solana client implementations remains under discussion, with no adoption decision or rollout date established.
On Oct. 30, Brennan Watt, Anza’s CEO, asked participants in the Solana Improvement Documents (SIMD) forum to comment. Under the proposal, ideas would still start in SIMD Discussions, followed by pull requests setting out specific revisions to the shared document.
The pull requests would be merged once their changes become active on Mainnet. Technical review, relevant contributor approvals and any governance approval required for a change would remain part of the process.
Watt said inconsistent accounts of protocol behavior across proposals can obscure which parts of the network a change touches. He also said newer developers may have to infer protocol rules by examining client software. The proposed specification would set requirements for developers creating independent implementations.
The current draft contains 18 chapters and is anchored to Mainnet epoch 1072. For its starting state, it requires either a trusted snapshot from that epoch or a different state authenticated to the epoch’s root. It leaves the first bank of epoch 1073 unspecified; a later Mainnet activation would require an updated specification.
A commenter identified as alnoki asked whether the written specification might omit interactions found in client implementations. Watt said some changes might need a prototype alongside the specification to provide confidence. The exchange left testing requirements unspecified.
If developers broadly support the proposal, Watt’s next steps would be to amend SIMD-0001, which outlines the proposal process, and settle the initial specification and where it will be hosted. No adoption decision or rollout date has been set.
