ndn-rs

Status — AI-authored; verify before you rely on it. ndn-rs targets the real NDN Packet Format v0.3 and NDNLPv2, and the wire layer is now property-tested and fuzzed (fuzzing found and fixed a real Name URI round-trip bug — see ADR 0005 and the conformance matrix). It is still a young, primarily AI-authored stack: treat it as a capable implementation to build on and audit, not as a reference implementation of NDN. For a reference, use NFD, ndn-cxx, NDNts, ndnd, or python-ndn. Known gaps are tracked in the spec-compliance summary.

ndn-rs is the core library: naming and TLV/packet codecs, data-centric security (signing, verification, trust schemas, certificates, DID), the forwarding engine (PIT/FIB/CS, strategies, RIB), standard faces (UDP/TCP/Unix/Ethernet), dataset sync (SVS/PSync), and the Consumer/Producer app API. It depends on nothing else in the ecosystem, and the same code targets native, wasm32, and bare-metal riscv32 no_std.

Documentation

• Using ndn-rs — the wiki's Part I: quickstarts, concepts, and guides for writing apps, running the forwarder, and choosing transports.
• Inside ndn-rs — the wiki's Part II: the contributor book. Architecture tour (with an animated forwarding-pipeline walkthrough and an interactive crate graph), cookbooks (add a face / strategy / mgmt module / sync dialect / storage backend), the testing guide, the spec conformance matrix, the cross-repo contract, and decision records.
• API docs — cargo doc --workspace --no-deps --open.

The ecosystem

Repo	What
ndn-rs	core library (this repo)
ndn-ext	extensions: non-standard faces, routing, discovery, strategies, compute, service stack, bindings (wasm/python/FFI)
ndn-fwd	the forwarder binary + CLIs
ndn-radio-drivers	USB Wi-Fi / LoRa radio drivers + the radio-foundation crates (moved here from ndn-rs, 2026-08)
ndn-dashboard	operator dashboard (Dioxus)
ndn-mobile	mobile node + FFI for the Android apps
ndn-embedded	no_std embedded forwarder
ndn-repo	persistent named-data repository daemon
ndn-sim	simulator
ndn-course	applied-Rust teaching course built on ndn-rs
ndn-anchor	Anchor app (Android/iOS) — presence over NAN + BLE
ndn-ripple	Ripple app (Android) — nearby peers

(Thirteen repos in all — the table skips one private research repo. The authoritative inventory is the workspace-level STATE.md in the ndn-workspace checkout, regenerated by tools/gen_state.py.)

The sibling repos depend on ndn-rs; the exact API surface they rely on is the cross-repo contract, which CI guards with cargo-semver-checks.

Build & test

cargo build --workspace
cargo nextest run --workspace     # ~1900 tests, ~25s (falls back to cargo test)
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets
cargo doc --workspace --no-deps

The toolchain is pinned in rust-toolchain.toml; the lint policy (including deny(unsafe_code) outside the OS-I/O face crates) lives in Cargo.toml [workspace.lints]. See the contribution workflow before opening a PR. Attribution: ATTRIBUTION.md.