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sääl | core polish + proto + in-memory store
Jan 10, 2026

Quick engineering log for sääl. The current round of changes is mostly about
tightening the core types, making canonical encoding boringly deterministic,
and putting a thin protocol + storage layer around it so the rest of the
system has something real to plug into.
Updates
saal-core got a few practical fixes and clarifications:

Canonical CBOR is now explicit: serialization goes through
serde_cbor::value::to_value so map key ordering is deterministic before
hashing.
Signature plumbing cleaned up: the Ed25519 Signer trait is in scope,
and signature decoding uses explicit length errors instead of ambiguous ?
behavior.
Dependency hygiene: serde_bytes is in place anywhere we use
#[serde(with = "serde_bytes")] for byte arrays.

Net result: ObjectId hashing is stable, and the sign/verify path is a little
harder to trip over.
Protocol surface (saal-proto)
I added a small saal-proto crate that just defines message shapes and
CBOR codecs:

GetObject request/response (fetch by ObjectId).
GetAuthorLog request/response (seq-based author log paging).
A tiny PingPolicy message for capability negotiation.

Everything is encoded/decoded via canonical CBOR so the wire format stays
consistent across implementations.
In-memory store (saal-store-mem)
There’s now a minimal in-memory store to make the protocol testable:

Objects are stored as canonical CBOR bytes of signed Objects.
Author logs are indexed by seq using a BTreeMap, so paging is
deterministic.
Tests exercise round-trip decode + signature verification on stored
entries.

It’s intentionally simple, but it’s already enough to test end-to-end flows
without a real database.
Tooling cleanup
I dropped in a basic Makefile and .gitignore so the workflow is less
repetitive, plus a few small dependency nudges to keep the workspace
compiling cleanly.
Next

A storage trait so the in-memory store can be swapped out cleanly.
Wire-level integration tests with CBOR fixtures.
A tiny CLI for creating and inspecting objects during development.