Firm

The Firm is a collection of Nedryland components that adds the notion of a "function".

Developer Setup

Firm is a Nedryland project.

First, install nix.

A development shell for any component can then be obtained by running

$ nix-shell -A <component> # component can be for example avery

Names of all components can be found in project.nix in the repo root.

The Function

A function can be described as a self-contained unit that takes inputs and produces outputs. However, it is not a function like in most programming languages in that it takes a set of inputs and then execute until completion and then produces a single return value. Instead, a function in this sense has multiple asynchronous inputs and multiple asynchronous outputs. A better way to think about a function might be as a node in an asynchronous node graph.

Execution of functions

A function is executed in something called an "execution environment". The function itself specifies which execution environment it needs and Avery then tries to find a matching one. An execution environment is simply something that accepts the function code (does not have to be actual code) along with its' inputs and executes it. Note that a function itself can also be an execution environment for other functions. Examples of execution environments could be WASI (for running in the Web Assembly System Interface, Python (for running python code on the host), etc.

Components in the repo

Avery

Avery is the heart of the functional pipeline. It is responsible for housing the base execution environments that need to run on a host OS, downloading function code and starting the execution. Avery also has a local development registry used for quick iteration when working on functions.

Bendini

Bendini is a CLI interface to Avery. It has functionality for registering, listing and executing functions.

firmRust

A Rust library that houses utility functionality for Rust functions targeting the WASI execution environment. Contains helpers to get inputs, set outputs and set errors etc.

firmTypes

Rust and Python type library for communicating via protobuf.

Nedryland Extensions

extensions/nedryland/function.nix contains a Nedryland extension that adds the notion of a "function" microservice component. This component is added to the base set of components that Nedryland already supports.

extensions/nedryland/runtime.nix contains a Nedryland extension for creating runtimes for functions.