Silkworm - C++ Ethereum Execution Client

C++ implementation of the Ethereum Execution Layer (EL) protocol based on the Erigon architecture.

Table of Contents

• About Silkworm
• About Silkworm for Erigon, aka Erigon++
• Obtaining Source Code
• Building on Linux & macOS
• Building on Windows
• Testing Silkworm
• Contributing
• License

About Silkworm

Silkworm is a greenfield C++ implementation of the Ethereum protocol based on the Erigon architecture. It aims to be the fastest Ethereum client while maintaining the high quality and readability of its source code. Silkworm uses libmdbx as the database engine.

Silkworm was conceived as an evolution of the Erigon project, as outlined in its release commentary.

Silkworm is under active development and hasn't reached the alpha phase yet. Hence, there have been no releases so far.

About Silkworm for Erigon a.k.a. Erigon++

At the very beginning, one of the main goals of Silkworm was implementing high-performance C++ libraries to be used directly within Erigon itself. Recently we focused again on this initial target, making it our highest priority and delivering the first release of Erigon++ starting from Erigon 2.59.0.

Erigon++ is supported on platforms:

• Linux x86_64 with glibc 34+, glibcpp 30+ (such as Debian 12+, Ubuntu 22+, etc.)
• macOS 14+ arm64

It is not supported on any arm64 Linux, Alpine Linux. Test compatibility by running silkworm_compat_check.sh

Please note that Erigon++ is just a fancy name for identifying such usage of Silkworm libraries within Erigon, which can be selectively enabled by specifying optional flags in Erigon command-line.

There are two possible usages of Erigon++:

• as a user, you may want to test Erigon++ features out of the box: in this case, no Silkworm build is required, you just build Erigon as usual and then enable any of the command-line flags:

--silkworm.exec [enables historical block execution powered by Silkworm]
--silkworm.rpc [enables Ethereum JSON-RPC API powered by Silkworm]
--silkworm.sentry [enables Execution Layer p2p networking powered by Silkworm]

• as a developer, you may want to experiment how you can build Erigon with Silkworm bindings and how you can play with them together through Cgo. If you are interested, we have some documentation about the development process of our C API for Erigon.

Obtaining Source Code

To obtain Silkworm source code for the first time:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/erigontech/silkworm.git
cd silkworm

Silkworm uses a few git submodules (some of which have their own submodules). So after you've updated to the latest code with

git pull

update the submodules as well by running

git submodule update --init --recursive

Building on Linux & macOS

Building Silkworm requires:

• C++20 compiler: GCC >= 11.2 or Clang >= 16 or AppleClang (Xcode >= 15)
• CMake
• Conan

Conan requires Python, and can be installed using:

pip3 install --user conan==1.64.1 chardet

On Linux the conan binary gets installed into $HOME/.local/bin which is typically in PATH already. On macOS need to add the binary to PATH manually:

export "PATH=$HOME/Library/Python/3.9/bin:$PATH"

Once the prerequisites are installed, bootstrap cmake by running

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

(In the future you don't have to run cmake .. again.)

A custom Conan "profile" can be passed via a cmake argument, for example:

cmake .. -DCONAN_PROFILE=macos_arm64_clang_13_debug

will use "debug" configuration builds of dependencies.

See available profiles in cmake/profiles.

The conan packages could also be pre-installed using conan install:

conan install --install-folder=build/conan --build=missing --profile=cmake/profiles/macos_arm64_clang_13_debug .

Then run the build itself

make -j

Note about parallel builds using -j: if not specified the exact number of parallel tasks, the compiler will spawn as many as the cores available. That may cause OOM errors if the build is executed on a host with a large number of cores but a relatively small amount of RAM. To work around this, either specify -jn where n is the number of parallel tasks you want to allow or remove -j completely. Typically, for Silkworm each compiler job requires 4GB of RAM. So, if your total RAM is 16GB, for example, then -j4 should be OK, while -j8 is probably not. It also means that you need a machine with at least 4GB RAM to compile Silkworm.

Now you can run the unit tests

make test

or the Ethereum EL Tests

cmd/test/ethereum

Building on Windows

Note! Windows builds are maintained for compatibility/portability reasons. However, due to the lack of 128-bit integers support by MSVC, execution performance is inferior when compared to Linux builds.

• Install Visual Studio 2019. Community edition is fine.
• Make sure your setup includes CMake support and Windows 10 SDK.
• Install Conan and add it to PATH.
• Open Visual Studio and select File -> CMake...
• Browse the folder where you have cloned this repository and select the file CMakeLists.txt
• Let CMake cache generation complete (it may take several minutes)
• Solution explorer shows the project tree.
• To build simply CTRL+Shift+B
• Binaries are written to %USERPROFILE%\CMakeBuilds\silkworm\build If you want to change this path simply edit CMakeSettings.json file.

Note ! Memory compression on Windows 10/11

Windows 10/11 provide a memory compression feature which makes available more RAM than what physically mounted at cost of extra CPU cycles to compress/decompress while accessing data. As MDBX is a memory mapped file this feature may impact overall performances. Is advisable to have memory compression off.

Use the following steps to detect/enable/disable memory compression:

• Open a PowerShell prompt with Admin privileges
• Run Get-MMAgent (check whether memory compression is enabled)
• To disable memory compression : Disable-MMAgent -mc and reboot
• To enable memory compression : Enable-MMAgent -mc and reboot

Testing Silkworm

Note: at current state of development Silkworm can't actually sync the chain like Erigon does.

You can try to run Silkworm to test just the sync on the pre-Merge Ethereum chain. In order to do that you need to:

• run an instance of Erigon Sentry component from branch release/2.60
• set the environment variable STOP_AT_BLOCK to a value < 15'537'351 (e.g. STOP_AT_BLOCK=15000000)

Linux and macOS

Erigon Sentry

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/erigontech/erigon.git
cd erigon
git checkout release/2.60
make sentry
./build/bin/sentry

Silkworm

export STOP_AT_BLOCK=15000000
./cmd/silkworm

Windows

Erigon Sentry

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/erigontech/erigon.git
cd erigon
git checkout release/2.60
make sentry
./build/bin/sentry.exe

Silkworm

$env:STOP_AT_BLOCK=15000000
./cmd/silkworm.exe

Contributing

If you want to contribute, you can read our contribution guidelines.

License

Silkworm is licensed under the terms of the Apache license. See LICENSE for more information.