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Add Block-STM animation - #8

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codex/create-animation-for-blockstm
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Add Block-STM animation#8
gregnazario wants to merge 2 commits into
mainfrom
codex/create-animation-for-blockstm

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@gregnazario

@gregnazario gregnazario commented Aug 9, 2025

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Summary

  • add animated SVG illustrating Block-STM transaction execution
  • document Block-STM with references to external articles and paper
  • include new Block-STM chapter in the concurrency section

Testing

  • mdbook build (fails: mdbook-linkcheck not installed)

https://chatgpt.com/codex/tasks/task_b_6896bc052dbc83208a0c646e4f9926eb

Copilot AI review requested due to automatic review settings August 9, 2025 05:37
Copilot AI reviewed Aug 9, 2025
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Pull Request Overview

This PR introduces documentation for Block-STM, a parallel execution engine used in blockchain systems. The documentation includes an explanation of the technology, an animated SVG illustration, and references to external resources.

  • Adds a new Block-STM chapter with technical explanation and visual demonstration
  • Integrates the Block-STM documentation into the concurrency section of the book
  • Provides external references including research papers and blog articles

Reviewed Changes

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 3 changed files in this pull request and generated 1 comment.

File Description
src/concurrency/blockstm.md New documentation file explaining Block-STM with animation and references
src/SUMMARY.md Adds Block-STM chapter to the concurrency section table of contents

Comment thread src/concurrency/blockstm.md Outdated
Block-STM is an optimistic parallel execution engine that runs transactions speculatively, validates their read and write sets, and re-executes only the ones that conflict. This approach enables high throughput for the Aptos blockchain by keeping cores busy while preserving deterministic results.

![Animated view of Block-STM](./blockstm-animation.svg)

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The referenced SVG file blockstm-animation.svg is not included in this PR. This will result in a broken image link when the documentation is built.

Suggested change

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@gregnazario

gregnazario commented Feb 20, 2026

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@cursoragent can you rebase this and improve the animation

@cursor

cursor Bot commented Feb 20, 2026 •
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Done. Here's what I did:

  • Rebased the branch onto the latest origin/main (resolved a conflict in SUMMARY.md where main uses "Parallelization" instead of "Concurrency" — moved the Block-STM files to src/parallelization/ accordingly).

  • Replaced the minimal SVG animation (3 rectangles sliding horizontally) with a detailed, color-coded pipeline diagram showing 5 transactions flowing through Execute, Validate, Re-execute, and Commit phases. Tx 2 demonstrates a conflict during validation with a red marker, a curved re-execution arrow, and an "read-set invalidated" annotation. The new SVG includes phase column headers, a legend, drop shadows, and staggered entry animations.

  • Expanded blockstm.md from a brief paragraph to a full explanation covering how Block-STM works (speculative execution, validation, re-execution, commit), why it matters for throughput, and the same references to the research paper and blog posts.

Open in Web Open in Cursor 

gregnazario and others added 2 commits February 20, 2026 17:28
@gregnazario @cursoragent
Add Block-STM animation
3224b54
@cursoragent @gregnazario
Improve Block-STM animation and documentation
5b94180 
- Replace minimal SVG with detailed animated pipeline showing 5 transactions
  flowing through Execute → Validate → Re-execute → Commit phases
- Tx 2 demonstrates conflict detection and re-execution path
- Add color-coded legend, phase column headers, and explanatory notes
- Expand blockstm.md with step-by-step explanation of how Block-STM works
- Move files from concurrency/ to parallelization/ to match main branch structure

Co-authored-by: Greg Nazario <greg@gnazar.io>
@cursor
cursor Bot force-pushed the codex/create-animation-for-blockstm branch from ed3b508 to 5b94180 Compare February 20, 2026 17:30
@gregnazario gregnazario closed this Mar 5, 2026
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@gregnazario @cursoragent