This summer Fission attended IPFS Thing, a week-long gathering in Reykjavik, Iceland for the IPFS implementors community. We gave several presentations, one of which was led by CTO Brooklyn Zelenka on Autocodec.
We recently introduced you to IPVM and reviewed CIDs. CIDs can identify data and are equipped with a codec.
But what if the data itself had the codec already embedded in it? An "autocodec" would enable interoperability because the gateway or app wouldn't need to already know how to encode/decode the data.
Right now, we need to program several languages into the gateway so it knows how to run the codec. But an autocodec would have that translation built in.
Think of it like a person who only speaks Japanese approaching a visitor center clerk. This clerk would need to know every language in the world (or at least the most popular ones) in order to be prepared to communicate with any tourist who approaches them.
But this is time-consuming and labor intensive. Instead, all the Japanese speaker has to do is walk up with a Japanese-to-English dictionary, and the clerk who speaks English is now able to be of assistance.
This is how autocodec works. If the gateway understands IPFS and Wasm, we don't need to program all those other languages. The autocodec would only need to give instructions on how to convert (insert language here) into binary and Wasm would do the rest.
Suddenly, we have interoperability in IPFS!
View Brooklyn's full presentation on Autocodec below and reference the corresponding slides for more information.