🚀 We're excited to announce the 0.2.x release series of the ContextVM SDK, a significant milestone focused on reliability, code quality, and architectural maturity. This release transforms ContextVM from a functional prototype into a hardened foundation ready for long-running servers. As well this release maintains backward compatibility while setting the stage for future enhancements.
- What This Release Means for You and Key Improvements
If you're running ContextVM servers that need to stay always up handling continuous client connections, this release is essential. We've eliminated critical failure modes, plugged memory leaks, and restructured the codebase to support future growth without accumulating technical debt.
🛡 Half-Open Connection Hardening (Applesauce Relay Handler)
One of the most significant reliability improvement addresses how we handle half-open connections, those frustrating scenarios where a relay appears connected but silently stops responding.
What we fixed:
- Implemented proactive liveness checks that detect unresponsive relays before they impact clients
- Added automatic relay pool rebuilding with subscription replay, so clients don't even notice when a relay hiccups
- Enhanced error handling ensures cleanup happens correctly even when relays misbehave
Why it matters: Previously, a relay could appear healthy while silently dropping messages, leading to client timeouts. Now, ContextVM detects these conditions and automatically recovers.
🧹 Memory Leak Elimination
Through careful analysis, we identified and eliminated several memory leaks that could affect long-running servers, the result: Servers can now run indefinitely without requiring restarts to reclaim memory.
🏗 Transport Modularization
We've completely restructured the Nostr transport layer from a monolithic design into focused, composable modules
Why this matters: This modularization achieves several goals simultaneously:
- Code clarity: Each module has a single, well-defined responsibility
- Testability: Modules can be tested in isolation with clear boundaries
- Extensibility: New features can be added without touching unrelated code
- Performance: O(N) operations reduced to O(1) where it counts
This architecture will let us add the new features that are coming without cluttering the core logic.
📦 Simple Pool Deprecation Notice
We're officially deprecating the `SimpleRelayPool` implementation. The `ApplesauceRelayPool` is now our recommended and fully-supported relay pool. If you're still using `SimpleRelayPool`, we recommend migrating to `ApplesauceRelayPool` for production deployments.
🔧 Additional Reliability Improvements
- Graceful shutdown: Task queue now waits for running tasks to complete with configurable timeout
- Timeout handling: Added timeout wrappers to prevent hanging network operations
- Error handling: Enhanced error context logging with stack traces and relevant identifiers
- Session eviction protection: Prevent edge cases under heavy load removing sessions with active routes, eliminating data loss during in-flight requests
- Dependency updates: Updated to latest stable versions of key dependencies
🧑💻 For Developers
This release maintains backward compatibility while setting the stage for future enhancements. The modular architecture means you can expect:
- Easier debugging: Clear separation makes issues easier to isolate
- Faster iteration: New features can be developed without touching existing code
- Better testing: Comprehensive test coverage for each module
- Stable APIs: Internal refactoring won't break your integrations
🔭 Looking Ahead
The 0.2.x series establishes the foundation for upcoming features that are already in our pipeline:
- [CEP-15] Common Tool Schemas
- [CEP-8] Capability Pricing And Payment Flow
- CEP-XX Server reviews
- CEP-XX Server profile metadata and socials
- CEP-XX Ephemeral gift wraps
With this hardened foundation, we can add these capabilities without coupling or cluttering the codebase.
- Upgrade Recommendation
All production deployments should upgrade to 0.2.x. The reliability improvements, especially around relay handling and memory management, are critical for long-running servers. The modular architecture also makes future upgrades smoother.
As always, we welcome your feedback and contributions. The ContextVM project thrives on community input, and this release reflects many lessons learned from real-world usage.
Happy building! 🚀
- What This Release Means for You and Key Improvements
If you're running ContextVM servers that need to stay always up handling continuous client connections, this release is essential. We've eliminated critical failure modes, plugged memory leaks, and restructured the codebase to support future growth without accumulating technical debt.
🛡 Half-Open Connection Hardening (Applesauce Relay Handler)
One of the most significant reliability improvement addresses how we handle half-open connections, those frustrating scenarios where a relay appears connected but silently stops responding.
What we fixed:
- Implemented proactive liveness checks that detect unresponsive relays before they impact clients
- Added automatic relay pool rebuilding with subscription replay, so clients don't even notice when a relay hiccups
- Enhanced error handling ensures cleanup happens correctly even when relays misbehave
Why it matters: Previously, a relay could appear healthy while silently dropping messages, leading to client timeouts. Now, ContextVM detects these conditions and automatically recovers.
🧹 Memory Leak Elimination
Through careful analysis, we identified and eliminated several memory leaks that could affect long-running servers, the result: Servers can now run indefinitely without requiring restarts to reclaim memory.
🏗 Transport Modularization
We've completely restructured the Nostr transport layer from a monolithic design into focused, composable modules
Why this matters: This modularization achieves several goals simultaneously:
- Code clarity: Each module has a single, well-defined responsibility
- Testability: Modules can be tested in isolation with clear boundaries
- Extensibility: New features can be added without touching unrelated code
- Performance: O(N) operations reduced to O(1) where it counts
This architecture will let us add the new features that are coming without cluttering the core logic.
📦 Simple Pool Deprecation Notice
We're officially deprecating the `SimpleRelayPool` implementation. The `ApplesauceRelayPool` is now our recommended and fully-supported relay pool. If you're still using `SimpleRelayPool`, we recommend migrating to `ApplesauceRelayPool` for production deployments.
🔧 Additional Reliability Improvements
- Graceful shutdown: Task queue now waits for running tasks to complete with configurable timeout
- Timeout handling: Added timeout wrappers to prevent hanging network operations
- Error handling: Enhanced error context logging with stack traces and relevant identifiers
- Session eviction protection: Prevent edge cases under heavy load removing sessions with active routes, eliminating data loss during in-flight requests
- Dependency updates: Updated to latest stable versions of key dependencies
🧑💻 For Developers
This release maintains backward compatibility while setting the stage for future enhancements. The modular architecture means you can expect:
- Easier debugging: Clear separation makes issues easier to isolate
- Faster iteration: New features can be developed without touching existing code
- Better testing: Comprehensive test coverage for each module
- Stable APIs: Internal refactoring won't break your integrations
🔭 Looking Ahead
The 0.2.x series establishes the foundation for upcoming features that are already in our pipeline:
- [CEP-15] Common Tool Schemas
- [CEP-8] Capability Pricing And Payment Flow
- CEP-XX Server reviews
- CEP-XX Server profile metadata and socials
- CEP-XX Ephemeral gift wraps
With this hardened foundation, we can add these capabilities without coupling or cluttering the codebase.
- Upgrade Recommendation
All production deployments should upgrade to 0.2.x. The reliability improvements, especially around relay handling and memory management, are critical for long-running servers. The modular architecture also makes future upgrades smoother.
As always, we welcome your feedback and contributions. The ContextVM project thrives on community input, and this release reflects many lessons learned from real-world usage.
Happy building! 🚀