SSB Log Entry 899

Could I Port Pigeon Protocol Work to My Device?

Because #pigeon-protocol does not (and never will) require a network stack, the things needed to create a client library are minimal. This minimalism is a main goal of the project.

If you are starting a new implementation of Pigeon, you really only need three things:

A SHA256 lib
An ED25519 lib
A persistence layer (filesystem, SQLite, etc..)

The three items above are "reasonably complex" and would not be easily implemented by a single developer (and would you really want to write your own crypto lib anyway?). For most languages, these tools already exist and can be easily imported.

Aside from the three requirements above, there are a few "nice to have" tools that will greatly simplify client development, but which are not difficult to create by hand if unavailable:

A string scanner or parser lib of some sort for parsing incoming messages. It must turn a textual pigeon document into an in-memory data structure.
A Crockford base32 encoder / decoder