NATS - Zig Client

This is a Zig client library for the NATS messaging system. It's currently a thin wrapper over NATS.c, which is included and automatically built as part of the package.

There are three main goals:

1. Provide a Zig package that can be used with the Zig package manager.
2. Provide a native-feeling Zig client API.
3. Support cross-compilation to the platforms that Zig supports.

nats.c is compiled against a copy of LibreSSL that has been wrapped with the zig build system. This appears to work, but it notably is not specifically OpenSSL, so there may be corner cases around encrypted connections. The protobuf-c runtime library is compiled directly in-tree.

Status

All basic nats.c APIs are wrapped. The JetStream APIs are not currently wrapped, and the streaming API is not wrapped. It is unlikely I will wrap these as I do not require them for my primary use case. Contributions on this front are welcome. People who are brave or desperate can use these APIs unwrapped through the exposed nats.nats_c object.

In theory, all wrapped APIs are referenced in unit tests so that they are at least checked to compile correctly. The unit tests do not do much in the way of behavioral testing, under the assumption that the underlying C library is well tested. However, there may be some gaps in the test coverage around less-common APIs.

The standard workflows around publishing and subscribing to messages seem to work well and feel (in my opinion) sufficiently Zig-like. Some of the APIs use getter/setter functions more heavily than I think a native Zig implementation would, due to the fact that the underlying C library is designed with a very clean opaque handle API style.

Only tagged release versions of nats.c will be used. The current version of nats.c being used is 3.7.0.

Zig Version Support

Since the language is still under active development, any written Zig code is a moving target. The plan is to support Zig 0.11.* exclusively until the NATS library API has good coverage and is stabilized. At that point, if there are major breaking changes, a maintenance branch will be created, and master will probably move to track Zig master.

Using

NATS.zig is ready-to-use with the Zig package manager. With Zig 0.11.x, this means you will need to create a build.zig.zon and modify your build.zig to use the dependency.

Example build.zig.zon

.{
    .name = "my cool project",
    .version = "0.1.0",
    .dependencies = .{
        .nats = .{
            .url = "https://github.com/epicyclic-dev/nats.zig/archive/<git commit hash>.tar.gz",
            // on first run, `zig build` will prompt you to add the missing hash.
            // .hash = "",
        },
    },
}

Example build.zig

const std = @import("std");

pub fn build(b: *std.Build) void {
    const my_program = b.addExecutable(.{
        .name="cool-project",
        .root_source_file = .{.path = "my_cool_project.zig"},
    });

    const nats_dep = b.dependency("nats", .{});

    my_program.addModule("nats", nats_dep.module("nats"));
    my_program.linkLibrary(nats_dep.artifact("nats-c"));

    b.installArtifact(my_program);
}

Building

Some basic example executables can be built using zig build examples. These examples expect you to be running a copy of nats-server listening for unencrypted connections on localhost:4222 (the default NATS port).

Testing

Unit tests can be run using zig build test. The unit tests expect an executable named nats-server to be in your PATH in order to run properly.

License

Unless noted otherwise (check file headers), all source code is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (which is also the nats.c license).

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.