hyperlane-monorepo/rust/README.md

Abacus Rust implementations

Setup

• install rustup
  • link here

Note: You should be running >= version 1.60.0 of the rustc compiler, you can see that version with this command and should see similar output:

$ rustup --version
rustup 1.24.3 (ce5817a94 2021-05-31)
info: This is the version for the rustup toolchain manager, not the rustc compiler.
info: The currently active `rustc` version is `rustc 1.60.0 (7737e0b5c 2022-04-04)`

Useful cargo commands

• cargo doc --open
  • generate documentation and open it in a web browser
• cargo build
  • compile the project
• cargo run --example example
  • run the default executable for the current project
• cargo test
  • run the tests

Useful cargo extensions

• tree
  • show the dependency tree. Allows searching for specific packages
  • install: cargo install cargo-tree
  • invoke: cargo tree
• clippy
  • search the codebase for a large number of lints and bad patterns
  • install: rustup component add clippy
  • invoke: cargo clippy
• expand
  • expand macros and procedural macros. Show the code generated by the preprocessor
  • useful for debugging #[macros] and macros!()
  • install: cargo install cargo-expand
  • invoke cargo expand path::to::module

Architecture

The on-chain portions of Abacus are written in Solidity. The rust portions are exclusively off-chain. Later, there may be on-chain rust for Near/Solana/ Polkadot.

Abacus will be managed by a number of small off-chain programs ("agents"). Each of these will have a specific role. We want these roles to be simple, and easily described. Each of these agents will connect to a home chain and any number of replicas. They need to be configured with chain connection details and have access to a reliable node for each chain.

For Ethereum and Celo connections we use ethers-rs. Please see the docs here.

We use the tokio async runtime environment. Please see the docs here.

Repo layout

• abacus-base
  • lowest dependency abacus utilities
  • contains shared utilities for building off-chain agents
  • this includes
    • trait implementations for different chains
    • shared configuration file formats
    • basic setup for an off-chain agent
• abacus-core
  • depends on abacus-base
  • contains implementations of core primitives
  • this includes
    • traits (interfaces) for the on-chain contracts
    • model implementations of the contracts in rust
    • merkle tree implementations (for provers)
• chains/abacus-ethereum
  • depends on abacus-core (and transitively abacus-base)
  • interfaces to the ethereum contracts
• agents
  • each of the off-chain agents implemented thus far

Running Locally

./rust/run-locally.sh