zigware

zigware is the Commonware Library rewritten from scratch in Zig: codec, cryptography, a deterministic runtime, storage, authenticated p2p, broadcast, and BFT consensus, with zero dependencies.

It is a ground-up port of the public commonware monorepo and keeps its layout: every crate there is a package here with the same name and the same dependency graph, and wire formats are byte-identical so the two can interoperate.

The estimator runs a consensus protocol written in a small DSL over the deterministic runtime and the simulated p2p network, with real AWS inter-region latencies, and reports when each region crosses each step (video). Here Simplex finalizes across seven validators in three regions in about 114 ms at the mean. zig build run-estimator -- <file.lazy> --distribution <region:count,...> runs any protocol in examples/estimator.

Warning

zigware is pre-alpha and being ported now. Do not use it in production.

Packages

Package	What it does	Status
codec	Serialize structured data	ported
cryptography	Keys, signatures, hashes, BLS12-381 threshold crypto	porting
math	Fields, polynomials, NTT	porting
runtime	Async tasks with a deterministic scheduler or io_uring	porting
storage	Journals, archives, MMRs, authenticated databases	porting
utils	Shared functionality across primitives	porting
parallel	Parallel folds with pluggable strategies	porting
actor	Coordinate concurrent components	ported
stream	Encrypted messages over any transport	ported
p2p	Communicate with authenticated peers	porting
broadcast	Disseminate data over a wide-area network	planned
resolver	Resolve data by a fixed-length key	porting
collector	Collect responses to committable requests	planned
coding	Erasure-code data for recovery from fragments	ported
clearing	Settle actions at scale	planned
consensus	Order messages in a Byzantine environment (simplex, aggregation, marshal)	porting
glue	Default constructions spanning several primitives	planned
deployer	Deploy infrastructure across cloud providers	planned

Support packages: formatting, conformance, invariants, simd, allocator, bench. docs/ARCHITECTURE.md maps every commonware crate to its package and lists the dependency order.

Design

• Zero dependencies. Only the Zig standard library: no C libraries, no vendored code, build.zig.zon has an empty .dependencies. BLS12-381, ed25519, secp256r1, the hashes, Reed-Solomon, the runtime, and the storage engines are all implemented here.
• Same wire formats. Encodings, storage layouts, and network messages match commonware's byte for byte, checked against commonware's own test vectors and conformance hashes.
• Deterministic simulation testing. All time, randomness, tasks, network, and storage go through the runtime. The deterministic runtime runs real protocol code on a simulated network with fault injection, and any run replays exactly from its seed.
• TigerStyle. Assertions on every precondition, postcondition, and invariant; every loop, queue, and mailbox bounded; no recursion; functions ≤ 70 lines. See docs/TIGER_STYLE.md.
• Fuzzed. Every decoder, parser, and state machine has a coverage-guided fuzz target and a seeded fuzz run that executes with the normal test suite.
• io_uring. The production runtime is completion-based IO on Linux, kqueue on macOS.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/refcell/zigware && cd zigware
just release

just release needs just and curl. It uses Zig 0.17.1 from PATH, or downloads it into .cache/zig, and writes optimized binaries to zig-out/bin. zigware has no other build dependency. There are no tagged releases; build from main.

Use a package from your own build.zig through the zigware module, or one package by name (b.dependency("zigware", .{}).module("codec")).

Contributing

just lists every development recipe. zig build test runs every package's tests and zig build test-<package> runs one. Contributor rules are in AGENTS.md; the port's work split is in docs/lanes and docs/ROADMAP.md.

License

MIT. zigware is a port of the Commonware Library, which is dual-licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0.