Mycelium is a set of typed formats for storing and transferring data. As you might expect it supports things like:

But as you might not expect, it also has support for:

• Refs (pointers)
• Expressions
• Functions/Procedures
• Types

Every value that you can specify in Mycelium has a Type (which is also a Value), and every Value can be stored or transferred. Values can be computed by evaluating Expressions. Expressions are also Values and can also be stored or transferred.

The Mycelium Virtual Machine (MVM) is an abstract machine model that defines what it means for a Mycelium Expression to be evaluated. It is not necessary to have an MVM implementation in order to send and receive Mycelium Values. A reference implementation of the MVM, written in Go, is available in the mvm1 directory.

Here are some fast facts about the MVM:

• All Values in the MVM are immutable.
• The MVM models interprocess interactions as operations {Input, Output, Interact} on special Values called Ports. These are the only operations with effects.
• Since all Values can be fingerprinted in constant time, it is very easy to add accelerators for known functions. e.g. the MVM has no addition operation, but a cannonical addition function is accelerated using the hardware's addition instruction.
• The MVM operations are defined in spec/op.go. The design favors a small amount of powerful operations over a large amount.

You can read more about the MVM here.

MycZip is a format for encoding Mycelium values so they may exist in a filesystem as a single file. A single MycZip file can hold a single Mycelium Value. This is hardly a limitation, since that Value can be an Array or Product, and transitively include as many other Values as desired.

The Mycelium Network Protocol (MNP) is a protocol for transferring Mycelium Values over the network between Peers.

Built on QUIC, it is a peer-to-peer message passing protocol, with support for Ask and Tell semantics on messages containing Mycelium Values. All parties are authenticated in MNP, and the cryptographic identity of each party has a cannonical representation as a Mycelium Value (called a Peer).

MNP caches all transferred values, and only Values not available locally will be transferred. e.g. If you send a lot of strings, you will only have to send the type for a String (cannonically List[Array[Bit, 8]]) the first time, and then never again.

You can read more about the MNP here.

A substrate is something that stores Mycelium Values and can perform computations on them according to the MVM.

A substrate, written in Go, is available in the mycss/ directory.

Spore is a programming language targetting the MVM. It is a data oriented language, where the emphasis is on defining Mycelium Values in a human-readable syntax.

You can read more about Spore here