Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

1. Introduction

Reference · normative · scope and terminology

Pulse Mesh is a wire format and a shared-memory transport for high-throughput, low-latency message passing. It is built on two primitives, both specified normatively in this standard.

  • The Pulse: a 128-byte, fixed-size, cache-aligned control and data signal, exchanged through a shared-memory ring or a UDP datagram.
  • The PulseEnvelope: a variable-size, content-addressed, byte-stable payload, referenced from a Pulse when data exceeds the Pulse boundary.

The Pulse is the core primitive. The PulseEnvelope is the standard primitive for variable-size payloads. Chapters 2 and 3 are the load-bearing standardisation claims; chapters 4 to 7 describe the substrates and the protocol the primitives flow through; chapter 8 defines conformance.

1.1 Scope

This standard defines the byte layout, alignment and field semantics of the Pulse (chapter 2); the canonical byte layout, the content-addressing scheme, the payload variants and the self-verification invariant of the PulseEnvelope (chapter 3); the SeqLock-protected shared-memory ring protocol Pulses are exchanged through (chapter 4); the envelope store that holds envelopes referenced from Pulses (chapter 5); the reference UDP transport’s framing, feedback, error correction and capability handshake (chapter 6); the Universal Port Protocol the daemon speaks to its clients (chapter 7); and the conformance requirements and the normative surface (chapter 8).

It does not define higher-layer routing, governance, identity or scheduling semantics, which build on Pulse Mesh and are specified elsewhere in the Sovereignty stack; production hardening such as failover, persistence, replication or consensus, since the reference implementation is reference-grade; or language bindings, optimised variants and alternative transports, which live in satellite repositories that conform through the vectors in chapter 8 and register in the profiles repository’s modules.toml.

1.2 Terminology

Requirement words. MUST, MUST NOT, REQUIRED, SHALL, SHALL NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, RECOMMENDED, MAY and OPTIONAL are to be read as in RFC 2119.

Conformance terms. A conformant implementation produces byte-identical output to the vectors under pulse/pulse-spec/test-vectors for the field inputs they define, and accepts byte-identical input that any other conformant implementation produces. Conformance is byte equality, not API parity.

Surface terms. The wire format is the byte representation of a Pulse or an envelope. The canonical encoding is the specific byte sequence a PulseEnvelope produces under section 3.1. A substrate is the medium a Pulse or an envelope is exchanged through: a shared-memory ring, a UDP datagram, a daemon connection.

Names. The glossary owns every other term this standard uses, in the sense this standard uses it.