juvix VS Nova

Heliax | Multiple roles | REMOTE (+-2 hours from CEST ideal) | Full Time | https://heliax.dev/jobs#all-jobs

Heliax is a public goods lab which was built on years of pioneering experience across distributed systems, programming language theory, and zero-knowledge cryptography. All our work is open-source. Examples of some of our projects are Namada (https://github.com/anoma/namada), a sovereign proof-of-stake blockchain; Juvix (https://github.com/anoma/juvix), an experimental programming language; and Taiga (https://github.com/anoma/taiga), a framework for generalized shielded state transitions.

We are currently actively hiring for a number of positions, most notably Senior Rust Engineers, Senior Full Stack Engineers, and a Protocol Security Lead.

For the Senior Rust Engineer position, we are looking for experienced Rust developers that are interested in applying novel research to create high-quality open-source technology and solve outstanding problems in the blockchain space. You'll be working on distributed ledger technology implemented in Rust, all the way up and down the stack from the P2P layer to consensus algorithms, smart contract systems, proof-of-stake incentive mechanisms, privacy-enhancing cryptographic components, and on-chain governance procedures.

For the Senior Full Stack Engineer position, we are looking for either web developers with experience using TypeScript and other modern web frameworks or software developers who have experience with Rust. Some representative examples of features you’ll be working on in this role are: adding support for Ledger hardware wallet connectivity, support for generation and use of file-based keys, generation of shielded transactions using cryptographic libraries, display of any digital asset (including NFTs) and associated transaction history, and on-chain management of staking and governance. It's a plus if you've previously worked with WebAssembly.

For the Protocol Security Lead, you'll be responsible for breaking protocols both in theory and practice in and outside the company, and assembling a team to help them do so. You'll receive a high degree of latitude and autonomy to prioritize tasks and search for the weakest links in complex systems in order to break them. The rough structure could be compared to Google Project Zero, but with a focus on cryptographic protocols & implementations instead of web technology writ large.

> What are the companies that do exciting stuff in compilers?

Some companies solve problems that have a larger component of parsing and evaluating things.

One example is Hasura's SQL-to-GraphQL layer: https://hasura.io/

Another example is GitHub's CodeQL: https://github.com/github/codeql

A third example -- I forget the name of the company -- parses Counter-Strike games real-time and restructures this data for better analytical introspection, e.g. for betting, time-scrollable replay, 2D rendering, etc. There appears to be a lot of hard-earned going from a stream of events monkey-patched over two decades, to a complete model of a game (who's on what team, who is dead, what round is this, etc.)

Microsoft does a lot of interesting compiler-related stuff, too, of course.

Then there's blockchain: A lot of programming-language enthusiasts have been employed to write VMs and DSLs to express safe application-level environments. An example is Anoma's Juvix: https://github.com/anoma/juvix

A job I was looking at involved building a more programmatic interface to some legacy SCADA systems, i.e. make old factory monitoring systems interoperate via a DSL. The idea, I think, is to transform and manage the configuration files from a dynamic GUI system.

tl;dr: If your main tool is a compiler, there are compiler problems everywhere.

I dont know how hard it would be to port it to other platforms. Different Virtual machine.

Tezos uses a human readable stack based language as a low level represenation that is suited for formal proofs: https://tezos.gitlab.io/008/michelson.html

If archetype depends on that then its going to be hard to port but i dont think it does.

Another interesting project in development is https://juvix.org/ which targets more backends beside michelson like llvm and wasm. Might run on eth2/Ewasm.

There are also blockchain specific features like: https://medium.com/tqtezos/tickets-on-tezos-part-1-a7cad8cc7...

Rust is very nice and might be a good fit for smart contracts tough i am not sure what you really gain over Haskell. In Tezos you have a more developed ecosystem and can code in Python, Ligo, Archetype, Haskell and in the future Juvix. You also have a human readable low level (assembly like) representation in Michelson that you can do optimizations and/or run formal proofs with Coq. Smart contracts are a very very special beast and i am somewhat sceptical about developing them in a general purpose language vs a domain/smart contract specific one in the long run (but i could be wrong here).

and in the future: https://juvix.org/ (This stuff is just ridiculously advanced)

Github: https://github.com/metastatedev/juvix

Best regards,

Lurk Lab @ Protocol Labs | Multiple Positions | REMOTE | Full-time

Lurk Lab is building Lurk (https://github.com/lurk-lang), a Turing-complete programming language for recursive zk-SNARKs. Lurk implements a minimal Lisp whose program executions can be proved in zero-knowledge, yielding succinct proofs that are concretely small and fast to verify. Lurk uses a Rust implementation (https://github.com/lurk-lang/lurk-rs) for expression evaluation, proving, and verification, with Nova (https://github.com/microsoft/Nova/) as its proving backend. Because Lurk is Turing-complete, it can be used to make and prove arbitrary computational claims (within resource limits).

We are looking for strong cryptography engineers, researchers, functional programming language specialists, applications developers, and start-up leaders/web3 entrepreneurs who want to build next-generation SNARK technology.

Ideal candidates will be knowledgeable about the state of the art in zero-knowledge proofs and (if looking for an engineering position) strong in Rust.

We are specifically hiring for:

- Rust Cryptography Engineers

Lurk Lab is building Lurk (https://github.com/lurk-lang), a Turing-complete programming language for recursive zk-SNARKs. Lurk implements a minimal Lisp whose program executions can be proved in zero-knowledge, yielding succinct proofs that are concretely small and fast to verify. Lurk uses a Rust implementation (https://github.com/lurk-lang/lurk-rs) for expression evaluation, proving, and verification, with Nova (https://github.com/microsoft/Nova/) as its proving backend. Because Lurk is Turing-complete, it can be used to make and prove arbitrary computational claims (within resource limits).

We are looking for strong cryptography engineers, researchers, documentation specialists, applications developers, and start-up leaders/web3 entrepreneurs who want to build next-generation SNARK technology. Relevant programming languages include Rust, Lisp, and (less significantly) WASM.

We are hiring for:

- Rust Cryptography Engineers, https://grnh.se/d94e94ec4us

- Software Engineers for Lurk Application Development, https://grnh.se/de7e82424us

- Documentation Engineer, https://grnh.se/10e2ca4d4us

- Start-up operator / business lead (currently unlisted, email [email protected] with CV and a brief cover letter describing your experience driving the business end of deep technical projects in the web3 space)

Lurk Lab @ Protocol Labs | Multiple Positions | REMOTE | Full-time contract-to-hire

Lurk Lab is building Lurk (https://github.com/lurk-lang), a Turing-complete programming language for recursive zk-SNARKs. Lurk implements a minimal Lisp whose program executions can be proved in zero-knowledge, yielding succinct proofs that are concretely small and fast to verify. Lurk uses a Rust implementation (https://github.com/lurk-lang/lurk-rs) for expression evaluation, proving, and verification, with Nova (https://github.com/microsoft/Nova/) as its proving backend. Because Lurk is Turing-complete, it can be used to make and prove arbitrary computational claims (within resource limits).

We are looking for strong cryptography engineers, researchers, documentation specialists, applications developers, and start-up leaders/web3 entrepreneurs who want to build next-generation SNARK technology. Relevant programming languages include Rust, Lisp, and (less significantly) WASM.

We are hiring for:

- Rust Cryptography Engineers, https://grnh.se/d94e94ec4us

There's been a lot of VDF progress. The new design is Sloth + SNARKs (specifically Nova with GPU-accelerated MSMs). We will have an end-to-end demo of a CPU-based VDF in a few weeks, and the first VDF ASICs test samples (12nm GlobalFoundries) will be produced in December 2022.

Arkworks isn't really addressing the core of what Lurk provides. In theory, we could use Arkworks to implement a backend — but we are targeting Nova (https://github.com/microsoft/Nova), and I don't think Arkworks supports Nova currently. So the part we are building from scratch (the language itself) is at a higher level of abstraction. We like Nova's characteristics and are actively helping with aspects of its implementation so we can use it as soon as possible.

Nova. Recursive SNARKs without trusted setup.