Contract Interface

Terms

• Contract State - data associated with a contract that can be retrieved by Applications and Delegates.
• Delta - Represents a modification to some state - similar to a diff in source code
• Parameters - Data that forms part of a contract along with the WebAssembly code
• State Summary - A compact summary of a contract's state that can be used to create a delta

Interface

Freenet contracts must implement the contract interface from stdlib/rust/src/contract_interface.rs:

/// # ContractInterface
///
/// This trait defines the core functionality for managing and updating a contract's state.
/// Implementations must ensure that state delta updates are *commutative*. In other words,
/// when applying multiple delta updates to a state, the order in which these updates are
/// applied should not affect the final state. Once all deltas are applied, the resulting
/// state should be the same, regardless of the order in which the deltas were applied.
///
/// Noncompliant behavior, such as failing to obey the commutativity rule, may result
/// in the contract being deprioritized or removed from the p2p network.
pub trait ContractInterface {
    /// Verify that the state is valid, given the parameters.
    fn validate_state(
        parameters: Parameters<'static>,
        state: State<'static>,
        related: RelatedContracts<'static>,
    ) -> Result<ValidateResult, ContractError>;

    /// Verify that a delta is valid if possible, returns false if and only delta is
    /// definitely invalid, true otherwise.
    fn validate_delta(
        parameters: Parameters<'static>,
        delta: StateDelta<'static>,
    ) -> Result<bool, ContractError>;

    /// Update the state to account for the new data
    fn update_state(
        parameters: Parameters<'static>,
        state: State<'static>,
        data: Vec<UpdateData<'static>>,
    ) -> Result<UpdateModification<'static>, ContractError>;

    /// Generate a concise summary of a state that can be used to create deltas
    /// relative to this state.
    fn summarize_state(
        parameters: Parameters<'static>,
        state: State<'static>,
    ) -> Result<StateSummary<'static>, ContractError>;

    /// Generate a state delta using a summary from the current state.
    /// This along with [`Self::summarize_state`] allows flexible and efficient
    /// state synchronization between peers.
    fn get_state_delta(
        parameters: Parameters<'static>,
        state: State<'static>,
        summary: StateSummary<'static>,
    ) -> Result<StateDelta<'static>, ContractError>;
}

Parameters, State, and StateDelta are all wrappers around simple [u8] byte arrays for maximum efficiency and flexibility.

Contract Interaction

In the (hopefully) near future we'll be adding the ability for contracts to read each other's state while validating and updating their own, see issue #167 for the latest on this.