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 to implement the Federation.

This is the opportunity to take back control of your communication and relegate the opaque cloud services to being just another provider to the federation. Though not syntactically backwards-compatible with the legacy IRC protocol, it is easily translated as a superset. Similar to the legacy IRC protocol's origins, it wisely leverages technologies in vogue for its day to aid the virility of implementations. A vibrant and growing ecosystem already exists.

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.

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 (1.61 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.

Additional dependencies

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

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

Planned dependencies

• 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 innovation

• Phase Zero: Core libircd

• Utils; Modules; Userspace contexts; Format strings; JSON; Database; Networking; HTTP; etc...

• Phase One: Matrix Protocol

• Core VM; Core modules; Protocol endpoints; Angular/JS client.

• Phase Two: Construct Clustering

• Kademlia sharding of events database; Maymounkov's erasure codes over shards.

• 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

The purpose of libircd is to facilitate the execution of a server which handles requests from end-users. The library hosts a set of pluggable modules which may introduce the actual application features (or the "business logic") of the server. These additional modules are found in the modules/ directory;

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

libircd can be embedded in your application with very minimal overhead.

Linking to libircd from your executable allows you to customize and extend the functionality of the server and have control over its execution, or, simply use library routines provided by the library without any daemonization. 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.

libircd runs only one server at a time.

Keeping with the spirit of simplicity of the original architecture, libircd continues to be a "singleton" object which uses globals and keeps actual server state in the library itself. In other words, only one IRC daemon can exist within a process's address space at a time. Whether or not this was a pitfall of the original design, it has emerged over the decades as a very profitable decision for making IRCd an accessible open source internet project.

libircd is single-threaded✝

The library is based around the boost::asio::io_service event loop. It is still an asynchronous event-based system. We process one event at a time; developers must not block execution. While the io_service can be run safely on multiple threads by the embedder's application, libircd will use a single io_service::strand.

This methodology ensures there is an uninterrupted execution working through a single event queue providing service. If there are periods of execution which are computationally intense like parsing, hashing, cryptography, etc: this is absorbed in lieu of thread synchronization and bus contention. Scaling this system is done through running multiple instances which synchronize at the application level.

✝ However, don't start assuming a truly threadless execution for the entire address space. If there is ever a long-running background computation or a call to a 3rd party library which will do IO and block the event loop, we may use an additional std::thread to "offload" such an operation. Thus we do have a threading model, but it is heterogeneous.

libircd introduces userspace threading✝

IRCd presents an interface introducing stackful coroutines, a.k.a. userspace context switching, a.k.a. green threads, a.k.a. fibers. The library avoids callbacks as the way to break up execution when waiting for events. Instead, we harken back to the simple old ways of synchronous programming where control flow and data are easy to follow.

✝ If there are certain cases where we don't want a stack to linger which may jeopardize the c10k'ness of the daemon the asynchronous pattern is still used.

libircd leverages formal grammars

We utilize the boost::spirit system of parsing and printing through formal grammars, rather than writing our own parsers manually. In addition, we build several tools on top of such formal devices like a type-safe format string library acting as a drop-in for ::sprintf(), but accepting objects like std::string without .c_str() and prevention of outputting unprintable/unwanted characters that may have been injected into the system somewhere prior.