Using as a library of managing membership, Is serf just provides a different/better implementation of memberlist?

[longquanzheng]

hashicorp/memberlist#46 (comment)

I found some comments here quite useful, but wanted to know more about the difference/decisions about the two projects:

AFAIK:

• memberlist is a library for managing cluster membership. It implements the gossip protocol.
• serf depends on memberlist. Even the serf.Config depends on memberlist.Config

serf seems provides more functionalities but if I just use as managing membership, what are the key difference in the implementation?

Or a big part of my question is -- why does serf depend on memberlist?

[eyazici90]

I was wondering the same thing and stumbled upon this issue :) Thanks for asking, @longquanzheng. 

The only things I found regarding the differences between these two libs were;

• https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/consul-scale-test-report-to-observe-gossip-stability#understanding-gossip-in-consul
• https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/consul-uses-both-serf-and-memberlist/20723 

 what are the key difference in the implementation?

I am curious about the answer as well :)

[tristanmorgan]

Here's a nice talk about how they build up on each other.

Everybody Talks: Gossip, Serf, memberlist, Raft, and SWIM in HashiCorp Consul