The specification
The normative description of the Pulse, the PulseEnvelope, the ring, the store, the UDP transport and the port protocol, and what a conformant implementation must reproduce.
Reference · normative · for anyone implementing, verifying or extending Pulse Mesh in any language
This is the Pulse Mesh Standard as the reference implementation in this repository realises it. Where a chapter describes the reference implementation rather than a requirement on every implementation, it says so at the top.
Status. Working draft, lineage draft-00. Breaking changes between draft revisions are expected and are recorded, not hidden: a superseded rule stays in the text, marked as superseded, with the revision that replaced it. The conformance vectors under pulse/pulse-spec/test-vectors are the executable form of chapters 2 and 3; the chapter text and the vectors are checked against the code by the documentation gate and the workspace tests.
How to read the requirement words. MUST, MUST NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT and MAY carry their usual normative meaning. A statement without one of those words is a description of the reference implementation, not a requirement on others.
| Chapter | Subject | Normative for |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Introduction | Scope and terminology | Everyone |
| 2. The Pulse | The 128-byte atom: layout, alignment, instructions, the heartbeat overlay | Every implementation |
| 3. The PulseEnvelope | The canonical bytes, the content id, payload variants, recursion, self-verification | Every implementation |
| 4. The SeqLock ring | The shared-memory ring: header, slots, writer and reader protocol, crashed writers | Shared-memory substrates |
| 5. The envelope store | The content-addressed store beside the ring: layout v2, claims that route around held slots, verified reads, lapping | The reference implementation |
| 6. The UDP transport | Datagram framing, CRC, feedback, FEC, the capability handshake | The reference transport |
| 7. The Universal Port Protocol | The daemon’s JSON protocol over WebSocket and Unix socket, and its connection policy | Every client of the daemon |
| 8. Conformance | What a conformant implementation reproduces, and what changes require a draft revision | Everyone |
| Appendix A. BLAKE3 | The hash the content id is built on | Informative |