melnet 0.2.27

Low-level RPC protocol used throughout Themelio for peer-to-peer communciations
Documentation

Melnet serves as Themelio's peer-to-peer network layer, based on a randomized topology and gossip. Peers are divided into servers, which have a publicly reachable address, and clients, which do not. It's based on a simple stdcode request-response protocol, where the only way to "push" a message is to send a request to a server. There is no multiplexing --- the whole thing works like HTTP/1.1. TCP connections are pretty cheap these days.

This also means that clients never receive notifications, and must poll servers.

The general way to use melnet is as follows:

  1. Create a NetState. This holds the routing table, RPC verb handlers, and other "global" data.
  2. If running as a server, register RPC verbs with NetState::register_verb and run NetState::run_server in the background.
  3. Use a Client, like the global one returned by g_client(), to make RPC calls to other servers. Servers are simply identified by a std::net::SocketAddr.