stblocks
Stblocks, short for state blocks, is a modular, block-based data structure designed to represent and manage state in distributed and streaming systems. A stblock encapsulates a unit of state and can be composed of smaller blocks to form a hierarchical representation. The design emphasizes immutability and deterministic serialization to support replication and auditing.
The term appears in several projects describing similar ideas; while not a formal standard, stblocks are typically
Data model: each block has an id (often a hash), a type, a payload, and metadata such
Core operations include create, compose (attach child blocks), merge, split, and snapshot. Pruning and garbage collection
Common use cases include event sourcing, configuration management, stateful stream processing, distributed caches, and ledger-like systems
Implementation considerations include encoding choices (JSON, CBOR, or binary), compression, encryption, and the cost of maintaining
Advantages include modularity, fine-grained versioning, and compatibility with content-addressable storage, while limitations include metadata overhead, complexity,
See also: content-addressable storage, event sourcing, Merkle tree, block store.