Pros and Cons of using Eclair vs other implementations (Lnd, C-lightning, etc)?

[dannydeezy]

Hi I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on how Eclair compares to the other lightning implementations. My aim is to run a large routing node with lots of channels. I'm super intrigued by Eclair's clustering capabilities, and notice that ACINQ has by far the largest node on the network. Any insights about people's experience with Eclair would be greatly appreciated!

[pm47]

Disclaimer: I'm an eclair developer and operator of the ACINQ node

If you like to be on the bleeding edge and try out fancy features, or if you need to run a node on constrained hardware, then you should go with respectively lnd and cln. But if your goal is to run a large node with lots of channels, then go with eclair. It has been designed for that purpose from the ground up. Scalability, reliability and performance are top priorities. Eclair is proven to scale to tens of thousands of channels (our node is much larger than what public metrics show, due to the unannounced channels that we have with mobile wallets like Phoenix), and is also the fastest implementation in an independent benchmark from a year ago.

Crucially, as you noted, the developers of eclair are also the operators of the largest node in the network, that means we eat our own dog food. The ever-growing channels.db issue on lnd is a typical example of something that would never happen on eclair, because it would have killed us. You can also expect flawless updates / db migrations, for the same reason, and a strong focus on reliability in general.

I'm super intrigued by Eclair's clustering capabilities

The clustering mode is useful to handle many concurrent connected peers and lots of routing table gossip, and also improves security by reducing the exposure of critical parts of the node. We haven't yet worked on clustering the backend part but it will probably happen at some point, eclair's tech stack (akka/scala) makes it pretty easy to do that kind of things.

The main con of eclair is that it runs on the JVM, and that's enough to turn off a lot of people 😆

[rushmi0]

I have a question

why not use Graalvm?