[][src]Crate solana_libra_canonical_serialization

This module defines traits and implementations of canonical serialization mechanism.

A struct can implement the CanonicalSerialize trait to specify how to serialize itself, and the CanonicalDeserialize trait to specify deserialization, if it needs to. One design goal of this serialization format is to optimize for simplicity. It is not designed to be another full-fledged network serialization as Protobuf or Thrift. It is designed for doing only one thing right, which is to deterministically generate consistent bytes from a data structure.

A good example of how to use this framework is described in ./canonical_serialization_test.rs

An extremely simple implementation of CanonicalSerializer is also provided, the encoding rules are: (All unsigned integers are encoded in little-endian representation unless specified otherwise)

  1. The encoding of an unsigned 64-bit integer is defined as its little endian representation in 8 bytes

  2. The encoding of an item (byte array) is defined as: [length in bytes, represented as 4-byte integer] || [item in bytes]

  3. The encoding of a list of items is defined as: (This is not implemented yet because there is no known struct that needs it yet, but can be added later easily) [No. of items in the list, represented as 4-byte integer] || encoding(item_0) || ....

  4. The encoding of an ordered map where the keys are ordered by lexicographic order. Currently, we only support key and value of type Vec. The encoding is defined as: [No. of key value pairs in the map, represented as 4-byte integer] || encode(key1) || encode(value1) || encode(key2) || encode(value2)... where the pairs are appended following the lexicographic order of the key

What is canonical serialization?

Canonical serialization guarantees byte consistency when serializing an in-memory data structure. It is useful for situations where two parties want to efficiently compare data structures they independently maintain. It happens in consensus where independent validators need to agree on the state they independently compute. A cryptographic hash of the serialized data structure is what ultimately gets compared. In order for this to work, the serialization of the same data structures must be identical when computed by independent validators potentially running different implementations of the same spec in different languages.

Modules

test_helper

Structs

SimpleDeserializer
SimpleSerializer

An implementation of a simple canonical serialization format that implements the CanonicalSerializer trait using a byte vector.

Traits

CanonicalDeserialize
CanonicalDeserializer
CanonicalSerialize
CanonicalSerializer