Design Principles

RLP is built for environments where correctness is not a feature — it is a constraint. Every transformation is deterministic. Every byte has a reason to exist. There are no hidden allocations, no implicit conversions, and no undefined behavior hiding behind convenience. The library favors structure over heuristics:

• types are mapped explicitly, not guessed
• encoding is canonical, not context-dependent
• failures are surfaced, not deferred

Performance follows from this: $\text{throughput} \approx \frac{\text{useful work}}{\text{branching} + \text{ambiguity} + \text{copies}}$ So the design removes branching, ambiguity, and unnecessary copies. This is not a framework. It is a small, predictable layer between typed data and bytes — intended for systems where reproducibility, auditability, and latency matter more than abstraction. If something looks simple, it is because the complexity was removed, not hidden.

Build Matrix

OS / Compiler	GCC 13	GCC 14	GCC 15	Clang 17	Clang 18	Clang 19	Clang 20
Ubuntu 22.04
Ubuntu 24.04

Development

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DRLP_BUILD_TESTS=ON -S . -B build # configure (debug + tests)
cmake --build build --parallel                                    # build everything
cd build && ctest --output-on-failure                             # run tests
cmake --build build --target docs_build                           # install mkdocs locally
cmake --build build --target docs_serve                           # run webserver @ http://127.0.0.1:9000/

Installation

sudo apt install build-essential cmake
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -S . -B build
cmake --build build --parallel
sudo cmake --install build

Usage

After installation, RLP is available as a standard CMake package:

find_package(rlp REQUIRED)
add_executable(app main.cpp)
target_link_libraries(app PRIVATE rlp::rlp)