#Rspace Introduction

The RChain Tuple Space

#Overview

rspace is a Scala library that has been designed to provide a disk-backed tuple space to the Rholang interpreter. It is based on an earlier, in-memory implementation written in the Rosette Base Language (RBL) found here.

Traditionally, a key-value store provides two main functions for interacting with a given store: put, which persists a piece of data at a given key, and get, which retrieves the data stored at a particular key.

rspace departs from this model and provides a novel approach to storing and retrieving data.

Here are some key differences:

• Rather than associating a piece of data with a particular key, in rspace, a piece of data is associated with a channel. Roughly speaking, in rspace, a channel can be any Scala type that can be serialized to and deserialized from an Array[Byte].

• In addition to storing data, rspace can also store continuations, which represent actions to carry out once the data is retrieved. Roughly speaking, in rspace, a continuation can be any Scala type that can be serialized to and deserialized from anArray[Byte].

• A continuation is associated with a list of channels and a list of patterns. Like channels and continuations, patterns can be any Scala type that can be serialized to and deserialized from an Array[Byte]. Users of rspace provide their own custom match function for matching patterns against data.

• The two main functions for interacting with a given store are:

  • consume, which searches the store for data matching a given list of patterns at a given list channels; and

  • produce, which, given a piece data at a given channel, searches the store for matching continuation, using existing data in the store to help satisfy the match.

#Prerequisites

• Java Development Kit (JDK), version 8
  • We recommend using the OpenJDK which can be installed using most common package managers.
  • Alternatively, the Oracle JDK is available here.
• sbt
  • Available here.

#Usage

To use rspace in a Scala project, add the following coordinates your build:

coop.rchain %% rspace % "0.1.1"

#Issues

Bug reports are welcome! Please report any issues you have with rspacehere.

#License

This project is licensed under The Apache 2.0 License.