Feature Request: IdlBuffer Program

[ngundotra]

There has been some issue with supporting IDLs in the program binary via a new ELF header section, versus officially supporting IDLs in PDAs.

Given that Anza is prioritizing changes to make program binaries smaller & more efficient to load, it seems like officially supporting the IDL in PDAs is better for cluster performance.

Good place to start would probably be to copy the IdlInstructions from anchor's injected macros.

I think it would be awesome if uploading IDLs to this program was natively supported in solana program deploy as well

[nickfrosty]

I think this is a great idea, especially if it was standard via the Solana/agave tooling. Having all programs upload their idl will boost comparability for programs

[buffalojoec]

It might be interesting to consider some version pairing constraints. Imagine you store your program's version in the ELF header instead, and then when you register the IDL with IdlBuffer, the version has to match the deployed binary's program version (must be deployed, not a buffer, this way the ELF has been verified). This would unlock versioned IDLs and the ability to identify missing/outdated IDLs.

You could also - in the future - maybe outfit the IdlBuffer program to identify known interfaces in the IDL, to store PDAs that contain program IDs of registered SPL Token programs, for example.

In either case, the tricky part is for IdlBuffer to be able to verify the IDL is actually for the provided program. Otherwise, program authorities could register false IDLs for malicious programs. I suppose you can still do that with an Anchor program, though...

[ngundotra]

@buffalojoec updated the spec to incorporate the versioning feedback: https://solanafoundation.notion.site/Program-Metadata-128d36dad52d801e974fcc3a30736506

[ngundotra]

I think it's better to leave the IdlBuffer unopinionated for now (storing only authority & bytes) & allow developers to figure out versioning systems - like just getting metadata.version in Codama & Anchor would be a win.

Relevant: https://discord.com/channels/428295358100013066/1295768706806321264/1298759290525319189