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Chr2

consensus for side effects (exactly-once is a lie)

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Most consensus libraries (Raft, Paxos) treat the state machine as a pure black box. This is fine until your state machine needs to actually do something, like charge a credit card, fire a webhook, or send an email.If a leader crashes after the side effect but before committing it, you get duplicates. This is my attempt at fixing this problem from first principles ish: build chr2 to make crash-safe side effects first-class citizens.mechanism:Replicated Outbox: Side effects are stored as "pending" in replicated state. Only the leader executes them under a fencing token.Durable Fencing: A manifest persists the highest view using atomic tmp+fsync+rename. This ensures a "zombie" leader can't wake up and double-execute stale effects.Deterministic Context: Application code receives a deterministic RNG seed and block_time from the log, ensuring 1:1 state transitions during replay.Strict WAL: Entries are CRC’d and hash chained. it is designed to prefer halting on mid-log corruption over guessing.The Trade-offs: Side effects are intentionally at-least-once; "exactly-once" requires stable effect IDs for sink-side deduplication. It’s a CP system safety over availability.Repo: https://github.com/abokhalill/chr2if you’ve ever had “exactly once” collapse the first time a leader died mid flight, you know exactly why I built this.

HN · launched Jan 11, 2026 · 12 upvotes (top 44%) · 0 views

Niche: distributed systems frameworks · 62 launches, 2 in the last 7 days ▼ -78% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Data infrastructure
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

No Designing distributed consensus systems that properly handle non-idempotent external side effects without two-phase commit flaws requires deep specialized knowledge in distributed systems theory.

What it would actually take: Requires building an atomic commit and consensus engine (likely written in Rust or Go) integrating distributed state machines with transactional outboxes, idempotency keys, and crash-recovery protocols. The core difficulty lies in formal verification (e.g., TLA+ specifications), edge-case network partitions, and partial-failure guarantees for non-rollbackable external side effects.

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Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 65 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #36 of 66 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 71 days after the earliest competitor.

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