Mini Measurement Kit

Mini Measurement Kit (minimk) is a personal, hobby project to reimplement measurement-kit/measurement-kit and measurement-kit/libndt as a small C++11 library exposing a C API.

Features

The project is in its early stage of development. The overall implementation direction is the following:

1. C++11 without using exceptions, RTTI, or the C++ stdlib to keep the binary size as small as possible and as free as possible from bloated dependencies with the overall goal (perhaps aspirational, but we will see) to weigh less than 1 MiB when compiled without debug symbols with -O2.

2. Cooperative single-threaded multitasking using coroutines and suspend/resume on timers as well as I/O events (only supporting sockets because Windows complicates supporting other kinds of handles).

3. Support for the following targets linux/amd64, linux/arm64, windows/amd64, windows/arm64, darwin/arm64. This should include the ability to compile for Android and iOS.

4. Target-specific files side-by-side in the same directory (e.g., coroutine switching in assembly and specific wrappers around system calls): switch_linux_amd64.hpp, stack_windows.hpp, etc.

5. Adopting secure coding standards and support testability by splitting units into three subcomponents: (1) a C API inside a C header file, (2) a testable template instantiated at compile time with either actual or mocked dependencies, (3) a C++ file that implements the C header by instantiating the corresponding template using the actual dependencies. This provides us with the ability to write testable code but also allows us to generate this code at compile time and avoid some bloat.

6. Support DNS-over-UDP, TLSv1.3, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, DNS-over-TCP, DNS-over-TLS, QUIC, HTTP/3 and DNS-over-QUIC. Support for the running ndt7 network performance tests (hence we also need support for JSON and WebSocket to implement this specific nettest).

7. Comprehensive tracing of the library functionality with the option of emitting, in the future, JSON-formatted structured logs, for easy post-processing, like rbmk-project/rbmk does.

8. Prefer Entity-component-system (ECS) to complex object hierarchies.

The main drivers for this project are self-learning, curiosity to understand how small the final library will be, and the aspiration to write simple and self-documenting code that could be useful to others.

Milestones (Long Term)

• Basic networking I/O on linux/amd64.
• Ability to run ndt7 tests.
• ...

Roadmap (Short Term)

• Implement errno mapping for linux/amd64.
• Implement accessing the monotonic clock for linux/amd64.
• Implement syscall wrappers for linux/amd64.
• Implement cooperative multitasking for linux/amd64.
• Implement cooperative socket I/O for linux/amd64.
• Structure the code for testability.
• Add examples that also serve as integration tests.
• Implement getpeername and getsockname.
• Implement DNS-over-UDP.
• Write unit tests for the codebase.
• ...

Architecture

Path	Description
include/minimk	Contains the public headers.
libminimk	Contains the project modules.
examples	Contains examples.
scripts	Contains helper scripts.
build.ninja	The build script.

Major Modules

Module	Description
errno	Contains error management code, including mapping system errors to our error defines.
syscall	Contains wrappers for the system calls that we support.
runtime	Contains the cooperative runtime including switching coroutines cooperatively, suspending coroutines until a timer expires, and suspending on I/O.
socket	Contains cooperative sockets that suspend as coroutines on I/O and have timeouts.

Dependencies

This project relies on the following developer tools:

• clang and clang++ — LLVM-based C/C++ compilers
• ninja — high-performance build system
• iwyu (Include-What-You-Use) — tools for include analysis
• clang-format — for code formatting
• clangd (optional) — language server, useful for IDE integration

To install these dependencies, use (on Debian "Trixie"):

sudo apt install -y build-essential clang clang-format clangd iwyu ninja-build

Debian Trixie ships with Clang ≥ 17 (Clang 19 is the default). Any recent Clang should work with this project.

Build Instructions

The project uses ninja for builds. Make sure dependencies are installed before proceeding.

We currently do not track inter-file dependencies very well, as such the recommended workflow is:

ninja -t clean && ninja

This command builds libminimk.a in the top-level directory as well as examples inside examples.

There are currently no automated tests.

Examples serve as integration tests until a proper test suite is developed.

We recommend running these examples to confirm ~everything is still okay:

./examples/time/00_monotonic.exe
./examples/runtime/00_coroutine_hello.exe
./examples/runtime/01_coroutine_pingpong.exe
./examples/runtime/02_coroutine_sleep.exe
./examples/socket/01_echo_test.exe

After you modify files, please format them as follows:

clang-format -i file1 file2 ...

Also, use iwyu to ensure the includes are okay:

for file in file1 file2 ...; do
    iwyu -Iinclude $file
done

License

SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later

See LICENSE for details.