Solving Distributed Systems Challenges with Zig

Participating in Gossiple Glomers using the Zig programming language as a way to learn the language and also learn about distributed systems and maelstrom. I envision writing all sorts of distributed system things with this thing.

Installation and Use

clone this project. src/Node.zig contains the implementation of of the maelstrom protocol that helps to interface with the maelstrom network and testing framework, use it to interface with the maelstorm network, contains too many bugs to be useful but it kinda works.

maelstrom setup

Download the latest maelstrom package from the github releases into the root of the cloned repository. You need the java runtime environment to run maelstrom.

adding new chanllenges

To add a new challenge (or a distributed system that can be tested in maelstrom), add a new directory in src/, add the new system's name, description and system specific commandline args to the ./build.zig.

An example of this is;

const challenges = [_]struct {
    name: []const u8, // name of the directory the challenge is in
    description: []const u8,
    workload: []const u8, // maelstrom workload to test against

    // extra arguments for maelstrom like --time-limit, --node-count, --rate etc
    args: []const []const u8, 
}{
    .{
        .name = "echo",
        .description = "echo challenge",
        .workload = "echo",
        .args = &[_][]const u8{ "--node-count", "1", "--time-limit", "10" },
    },
...
};

Look at src/echo or src/echo-service to look at how to interact with maelstrom network using src/Node.zig and how to write something that can participate in the network.

building and running the challenges

To build all the challenges/projects from src/ that have been added to the build script:

zig build -Dall

To build a specific challenge/project from src/, say one named echo:

zig build -Dchallenge=echo

To build and run the maelstom test for a particular challenge, say one named echo:

zig build -Dchallenge=echo run