Nickolas was just a user that wanted to understand how Lightning worked. The best way to learn about it was to build his own implementation.
Discussion
Acinq has two LN implementations. Eclair for big nodes is great, but they also wanted something for native wallet development without all the routing stuff, that's why they built phoenixd.
Core-lightning was born as a test platform for specification proposals, opening up the node for experimentation and custom tailoring.
LDK is super-flexible and can be used on any platform, like in the web.
It became the default for servers and enterprise-level nodes due to the high number of bindings to other languages.
NLightning will be both a library and a full-node.
It will be possible to build on top of the library, but the goal is also to have a node implementation.
Having new eyes on the specifications, like NLightning's, is very good to discover possible issues. This can help making the specs and the network more robust.
It has been a while since new implementation came in.
Most exciting updates for the future:
- Fabrice: 0-fee transactions
- Christian and Nickolas agreed: multy-parties channels
- Matt: gossip v2