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paulmillr/guidelines

Development & release guidelines for noble (https://paulmillr.com/noble), scure and other packages.

• Release order
• Coding practices
• Duplicated code
• Testing and fuzzing
• TODO

Release order

Before a release, integration tests should be ran. For example, if curves depend on hashes, they should install latest commit from github and try to run tests with it.

Release order is as follows:

1. noble-hashes, noble-ciphers, scure-base
2. noble-curves
3. scure-bip32, scure-bip39
4. micro-packed, scure-btc-signer
5. ethereum-cryptography

After that, 6. pull requests to consumers (such as ethereumjs-monorepo) can also be done.

Coding practices

• Don't use bigint literals: instead of 123n, use BigInt(123) or BigInt('123')
  • For compatibility with React Native and others
• Don't use array destruction, such as let [a, b] = arr
  • It overloads GC when used often, because it calls iterator protocol
  • Object destruction {a, b} = obj is fine
• Minimize for-of
  • Also uses iterator protocol, sometimes slow
• Minimize backtick quotes
  • Unfriendly to minifiers, sometimes even unsupported in subtle ways
• Don't use \n in strings: prefer String.fromCharCode(10)
  • Unfriendly to minifiers
• Typescript and prettier updates should be limited to once per 3-6 months
  • Their version diffs should be sanity-checked
• Helper packages are used to simplify development
  • paulmillr/jsbt is used to build files
  • micro-should is tiny 300-line testing framework
  • micro-bmark is tiny benchmarking framework

Duplicated code

Some code is duplicated between packages, because it's better than adding an additional dependency.

Every time a method is changed, it should also be changed in other places.

• hexToBytes, bytesToHex, concatBytes, isBytes / abytes are identical within:
  • noble curves, ciphers, hashes
  • noble secp256k1, ed25519 (vars renamed for compactness)
  • scure-base, micro-packed
• Tests for hexToBytes, bytesToHex, concatBytes must be present within all those packages

Testing and fuzzing

• hashes should run test:dos and test:big
• curves should adjust fast-check NUM_RUNS when ran on CI server

TODO

• Fuzzing documentation
• CI server set-up documentation
• minified file build & upload (update JSBT)

New CI tasks:

• Calculate coverage. Can be done by switching from micro-should to jest
• Compare NPM code to GitHub
• Scan NPM for malware
• Check for performance regressions, compare with previous commits / releases