Mycelium

Mycelium is a set of typed formats for storing and transferring data, like Protocol Buffers or JSON. As you might expect it supports things like:

• Bits
• Arrays
• Products
• Sums (Coproducts)
• Lists

But as you might not expect, it also has support for:

• Refs (pointers)
• Expressions
• Functions/Procedures
• Types

Every value that you can specify in Mycelium has a Type (which is also a Value), and every Value can be stored or transferred. Values can be computed by evaluating Expressions. Expressions are also Values and can also be stored or transferred.

Virtual Machine mvm1/

The Mycelium Virtual Machine (MVM) is an abstract machine model that defines what it means for a Mycelium Expression to be evaluated. It is not necessary to have an MVM implementation in order to send and receive Mycelium Values. A reference implementation of the MVM, written in Go, is available in the mvm1 directory.

Here are some fast facts about the MVM:

• All Values in the MVM are immutable.
• The MVM models interprocess interactions as operations {Input, Output, Interact} on special Values called Ports. These are the only operations with effects.
• Since all Values can be fingerprinted in constant time, it is very easy to add accelerators for known functions. e.g. the MVM has no addition operation, but a cannonical addition function is accelerated using the hardware's addition instruction.
• The MVM operations are defined in spec/op.go. The design favors a small amount of powerful operations over a large amount.

You can read more about the MVM here.

MycZip myczip/

MycZip is a format for encoding Mycelium values so they may exist in a filesystem as a single file. A single MycZip file can hold a single Mycelium Value. This is hardly a limitation, since that Value can be an Array or Product, and transitively include as many other Values as desired.

Network Protocol mycnet/

The Mycelium Network Protocol (MNP) is a protocol for transferring Mycelium Values over the network between Peers.

Built on QUIC, it is a peer-to-peer message passing protocol, with support for Ask and Tell semantics on messages containing Mycelium Values. All parties are authenticated in MNP, and the cryptographic identity of each party has a cannonical representation as a Mycelium Value (called a Peer).

MNP caches all transferred values, and only Values not available locally will be transferred. e.g. If you send a lot of strings, you will only have to send the type for a String (cannonically List[Array[Bit, 8]]) the first time, and then never again.

You can read more about the MNP here.

Substrate mycss/

A substrate is something that stores Mycelium Values and can perform computations on them according to the MVM.

A substrate, written in Go, is available in the mycss/ directory.

Spore spore/

Spore is a programming language targetting the MVM. It is a data oriented language, where the emphasis is on defining Mycelium Values in a human-readable syntax.

You can read more about Spore here