This Anchor suite has been developed as a showcase for the Strategy Pattern where a master program is initialized with a strategy knowing nothing about it at the beginning and just reading values from it.
During master initialization we need to specify a strategy_state account where the master during later refresh instructions will read the selected strategy outcomes.
Some of the advantages this pattern can introduce:
As long as the strategy is saving the outcome in the expected way, following the StrategyState account layout, we can create as many strategies we need. This can be useful for programs deployment: the master program can perfectly work with strategies deployed later than it.
master program knows nothing about the current strategy implementation, this leads to a good separation of concerns to implement coposable programs.
Following some of the main problems of the current implementation:
The StrategyState account has been replicated in each strategy:
#[account]
pub struct StrategyState {
pub value: u64,
pub refreshed_slot: u64,
}
this is needed to allow Anchor infer the correct program::ID for the account discriminator. We currently can't move the account in a common library or in the master program.
The StrategyState account has been replicated in the master program too. This allows the deserialization as:
let account_data = ctx.accounts.strategy_state.try_borrow_data()?;
let mut account_data_slice: &[u8] = &account_data;
let strategy_state = StrategyState::try_deserialize_unchecked(&mut account_data_slice)?;
but the StrategyState account shouldn't be a master program child account.
Considering the current Solana nested CPI calls limitations (as of now there's a limit of 4 nested calls) sometime can be usefull to save a cpi. We therefore decided to split the two instructions, calling directly the use_strategy instruction on the strategy and then the refresh instruction on the master. This way we can save one CPI call.
This approach can lead to the risk of using stale data in the master refresh ix, for example if the client forget to call use_strategy. Depending on the product context this can be something to avoid: introducing the refreshed_slot in the StrategyState could be an alternative, it can be used to check if the current state is stale and for example rejecting the master refresh call.