Nimbus: an Ethereum 2.0 Sharding Client for Resource-Restricted Devices

Join the Status community chats:

Rationale

Nimbus: an Ethereum 2.0 Sharding Client

Building & Testing

Prerequisites

• A recent version of Nim
  • We use the version in the Status fork
  • Normally, this is the latest released version of Nim but it may also include custom patches
  • Follow the Nim installation instructions or use choosenim to manage your Nim versions
• A recent version of Facebook's RocksDB
  • Compile from source or use the package manager of your OS; for example, Debian and Ubuntu have working RocksDB packages

Obtaining the prerequisites through the Nix package manager

Users of the Nix package manager can install all prerequisites simply by running:

nix-shell nimbus.nix

Build

We use Nimble to manage dependencies and run tests.

To build and run test suite:

nimble test

Based on our config, Nimble will write binaries to build/ - you can do this manually also, as in the following examples:

Run example:

mkdir -p build
nim c -o:build/decompile_smart_contract -r examples/decompile_smart_contract.nim

Run Ethereum JSON-based general state tests:

mkdir -p build
nim c -o:build/test_generalstate_json -r --experimental:forLoopMacros tests/test_generalstate_json.nim

Troubleshooting

Sometimes, the build will fail even though the latest CI is green - here are a few tips to handle this:

• Wrong Nim version
  • We depend on many bleeding-edge features - Nim regressions often happen
  • Use the Status fork of Nim
• Wrong versions of dependencies
  • nimble dependency tracking often breaks due to its global registry
  • wipe the nimble folder and try again
• C compile or link fails
  • Nim compile cache is pretty buggy and sometimes will fail to recompile
  • wipe your nimcache folder

License

Licensed under both of the following:

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license: LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT