New high speed engine for Goblinfactory Konsole clocks in at over 900 frames per second
This is the first public announcement that I'm changing the licencing for Goblinfactory Konsole, my open source project, and that version 9 will only be available with a commercial licence going forward.
I'll write up a detailed blog post with more details later, but I wanted to get this 'announcement' out now, so that anyone using 'Konsole' or considering using it can know where it's heading.
Goblinfactory Konsole, the free open source version (version 6) will no longer be upgraded, but will continue to be maintained, with bug fixes and security updates, reserving version moniker 7 for one much needed big security and patch upgrade coming shortly; and leaving moniker 8 in case I need to bring out one more new support
version of the free open source version with a breaking change. That being said, Goblinfactory free version is feature complete and will not include any new features going forward.
Version 9 - for the win!
It's possible (very likely, in fact 🤔) that version 9 will come out before either of free version 7 or free version 8. 😇
Development of Konsole version 9 (a complete cross platform console app library) is now officially underway, and the screenshots attached 'above' are from the first tests of the new high-speed engine 'core' that replaces the current engine and will be available as a paid licensed product. A simple benchmark shows a decent 'virtual' frame rate of just under 1000 fps in 256 colors, and close to an impressive 9000 fps in black and white (both completely cross-platform). The new engine works perfectly well inside the VSCode terminals as well, with a very respectable 144 fps frame rate (1) for debugging inside VSCode terminals.
This opens a huge range of options for Konsole development and it's potential uses in regulated businesses to dramatically reduce total project complexity, cost and risk ...
By replacing entire web UI libraries and frameworks with a small compact zero dependancy library with a simple, easy to use api, the count of total lines of code will radically drop.
... resulting in measurably better lead times
and orders of magnitude improvements in MTTR's (mean times to recovery).
From version 9 onwards, which will be a new fully cross-platform secure console app library, Konsole will only be available to customers via a commercial licence, and an annual maintenance support contract for larger companies for use in regulated industries, ensuring ongoing development and timely commercial support.
Goblinfactory Konsole not only enables rapidly constructing production grade prototypes, but also allows the same prototypes to go through quality control much faster and put into production with greater confidence about provable quality.
Companies are building more and more web dashboards for what should be simple business services resulting in many tens of thousands of lines of front end code needed to present users with a react, nextjs, angular or vue dashboard to even the simplest of business services; requiring costly specialised web skills to test and maintain.
The underlying JavaScript frameworks these dashboards and front-ends are built with are brittle and age quickly and require constant review, support and maintenance to keep secure and working.
It's common for a JavaScript project to no longer be able to be built from a fresh checkout after as little as a few months of inactivity.
Goblinfactory Konsole version 9 will give your teams a unified way of build console apps for microservices across teams ... that can be deployed, and then just left for years to reliably do their thing.
Konsole apps and services can easily be updated or maintained decades later with no specialised skills. (2)
Please message me if your company already uses Konsole version 6 and you're in a regulated space and are required by law to secure commercial maintenance licences as part of your compliance.
notes
(1) Virtual frame rates are the speed at which we're able to process buffered updates to the console via the host terminal. with Goblinfactory Konsole managing reliable thread concurrency and access to virtual windows via the Konsole API. The higher the frame rate, the less the console library impacts the services it supports, which is a critical consideration when building connected robust, performant and secure enterprise console micro-services.
(2) potentially decades later with no specialist skills : This refers only to the console UI application, and not to the actual micro-service the console application is the user interface for.