This — is The Construct

Internet Relay Chat daemon: Matrix Construct

IRCd was a free and open source server which facilitated real-time communication over the internet. It was started by Jarkko Oikarinen in 1988 at the University of Oulu and its derivatives underpinned the major IRC networks for decades.

Due to its age and stagnation since the mid-2000's, a growing number of proprietary cloud services are now filling the vacuum of innovation. In 2014 a new approach was proposed to reinvigorate real-time communication for free and open source software: a federation of networks known as the matrix.

IRCd has been rewritten for the global federation of networks    

This is the Construct — the first Matrix server written in C++. It is designed to be fast and highly scalable, and to be community developed by volunteer contributors over the internet. This mission strives to make the software easy to understand, modify, audit, and extend. It remains true to its roots with its modular design and having minimal requirements. Even though all of the old code has been rewritten, the same spirit and philosophy of its predecessors is still obvious throughout.

Similar to the legacy IRC protocol's origins, Matrix wisely leverages technologies in vogue for its day to aid the virility of implementations. A vibrant and growing ecosystem already exists.

Installation

Getting up and running with Construct is easy. A deployment can scale from as little as a low-end virtual machine running a stock linux distribution to a large load balanced cluster operating in synchrony over a network.

Dependencies

• Boost (1.66 or later) Replacing libratbox with the rich and actively developed libraries.

• RocksDB (based on LevelDB): A lightweight and embedded database superseding sqlite3.

• Sodium (NaCl crypto): Provides ed25519 required for the Matrix Federation.

• OpenSSL (libssl/libcrypto): Provides HTTPS TLS / X.509 / etc.

• GNU C++ compiler, automake, autoconf, autoconf2.13, autoconf-archive, libtool, shtool

Additional dependencies

• libmagic (Optional): Content MIME type recognition.

• zlib or lz4 or snappy (Optional): Provides compression for the database, etc.

Planned dependencies

• Adobe GIL (Optional): Image resizing & manipulation for the media system.

• libmozjs (Optional JavaScript embedding): The matrix room is directly represented as a javascript object. 🎨

• libpbc (Pairing Based Cryptography): Heads up! Heavy items are falling from the ivory tower!

• libgmp (Custom Maths): Experimental Post-Quantum Ideal Lattice Cryptography. 😮

Notes:

• libircd requires a platform capable of loading dynamic shared objects at runtime.

Platforms

Continuously Integrated Host	Compiler	Third party	Status
Linux Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial	GCC 6	Boost 1.61

Building from git (production)

./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

Building from git (DEVELOPER PREVIEW INSTRUCTIONS)

This is only intended to allow development with dependencies that have not made their way to mainstream systems yet. Not for release.

The developer preview will install Construct in a specific directory isolated from the system. It will avoid using system libraries by downloading and building the dependencies from the submodules we have pinned here and build them the way we have configured. You may need to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the built libraries and/or maintain an intact build directory.

./autogen.sh
mkdir build

• The install directory may be this or another place of your choosing.
• If you decide elsewhere, make sure to change the --prefix in the ./configure statement below.

CXX=g++-6 ./configure --prefix=$PWD/build --enable-debug --with-included-boost=shared --with-included-rocksdb=shared

• Many systems alias g++ to an older version. To be safe, specify a version manually in CXX. This will also build the submodule dependencies with that version.
• The --with-included-* will fetch, configure and build the dependencies included as submodules. Include =shared for now until static libraries are better handled.

make
make install

Developers

• Generate doxygen using /usr/bin/doxygen tools/doxygen.conf the target directory is doc/html. Browse to doc/html/index.html

Plan

Roadmap for service

• Phase One: Matrix clients using HTTPS.
• Phase Two: Legacy IRC networks using TS6 protocol.
• Phase Three: Legacy IRC clients using RFC1459 / RFC2812 legacy grammars.

Roadmap for deployments

The deployment mode is a macro of configuration variables which tune the daemon for how it is being used. Modes mostly affect aspects of local clients.

• Personal: One or few users. Few default restrictions; higher log output.
• Company: Hundreds of users. Moderate default restrictions.
• Public: Thousands of users. Untrusting configuration defaults.

Roadmap for innovation

• Phase Zero: Core libircd: Utils; Modules; Contexts; JSON; Database; HTTP; etc...
• Phase One: Matrix Protocol: Core VM; Core modules; Protocol endpoints; etc...
• Phase Two: Construct Cluster: Kademlia sharding of events; Maymounkov's erasure codes.

Experimental section

• Phase Three: Graduate Seminar

• Tromer/Virza's zkSNARK applied to JavaScript XDR evaluation verifying the distributed execution of a matrix room using MNT pairing curves.

• Phase Four: Dissertation Defense

• Phase Three with RingLWE; GPU accelerated matrix multiplication for the number theoretic transform...

• Phase Five: Habilitation

• Phase Four under fully homomorphic encryption.

IRCd Library

This library can be embedded by developers creating their own server or those who simply want to use the library of routines it provides.

Including libircd headers will not include any other headers beyond those in the standard library, with minimal impact on your project's compile complexity. The prototypical embedding of libircd is construct found in the construct/ directory.

• Can be embedded in your application with very minimal overhead.

• Runs only one server at a time.

• Is asynchronous and single-threaded✝.

• Introduces its own userspace threading.

• Leverages fast & safe formal grammars.

See the include/ircd/ and ircd/ directories for more information.