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What is zkLLVM
Compiler for circuits that allows you to transform your code into a circuit form. It’s a part of the toolkit, which is a set of tools for zk-SNARK and zk-STARK circuits development (input for zk-SNARK and zk-STARK proving systems). The final goal is to make zero-knowledge proofs and provable computations accessible for everyone with C/C++ or Rust programming skills. It requires no knowledge of zk-SNARKs or zk-STARKs, no knowledge of cryptography, no knowledge of circuit design. The only thing you need to know to start - is how to write code in C/C++ or Rust. There are some limitations though, but we will discuss them later - they are mostly related to the further optimizations.
zkLLVM directly transforms the code into a different representation. The transformation process is based on the LLVM optimizations, so the code is being simplified optimized for the circuit form.
Is is design to be able to work with different zk-SNARK of zk-STARK arithmetizations (a.k.a circuit representations). Current version is based on the PLONKish circuit components library of ours called blueprint, but it can be easily extended to work with other libraries - C++ or RUST ones - by writing small part of the whole compiler pipeline. We will discuss arithmetizations and arithmetization change in more details in the Architecture section.
The pipeline of the compiler is the following:
- Write the code in C/C++ or Rust. It’s a straightforward process because you can use the code you already have. It’s not required to rewrite the code from scratch, you need to add a few annotations, and that’s it. You can find more details in the Circuit Development section. Optionally, you can use the code from the SDK, which already contains many circuit-friendly algorithms implementations and will allow you to reduce the development costs. More about the SDK.
- Once you’ve written the code, you need to compile it into a circuit. It takes only a few seconds - the compiler transforms the code into another form without additional instructions or overhead. Everything is done by a simple command line tool, which is a replacement for clang and rustc. You can use it as a part of your development environment or CI/CD pipeline.
- The generated circuit can be used as input for the
assignertool. It takes the circuit and the input and generates the assignment (a.k.a the execution trace). Theassignertool is a part of the installation package and can be used as a part of your development environment or CI/CD pipeline as well.
zkLLVM pipeline
Last modified 5mo ago