Candid is an interface description language (IDL) for interacting with canisters (also known as services or actors) running on the Internet Computer. It provides a language-independent description of canister interfaces and the data they exchange, with type safety and extensibility.
- The spec directory contains Candid specifications, including the Candid language specification and a soundness proof.
- The official manual is hosted by dfinity; see ./docs for the source code.
- Roman Kashitsyn's Candid for engineers blog post.
- Joachim Breitner's Candid explainer blog post.
Candid supports several different programming languages. This repository contains some of the implementations developed by DFINITY.
- Rust: A serialization library based on Serde, and a compiler for generating bindings for other languages.
- Motoko: Compiler support for importing/export Candid files. Also see the Motoko-Candid type mapping specification.
- JavaScript: We provide a library for serialization of native JavaScript values, and a visitor class for extending Candid for building generic tools such as UI and random testing.
A list of community maintained Candid libraries:
- didc: Candid CLI. Download prebuilt binary.
- ui: Candid UI canister. See deployed canister on the IC
- ic-repl: A REPL environment to communicate with canisters using Candid
- Explain Candid: An online tool that decodes and explains a given Candid message. (Thanks to Ben Lynn)
- Candid playground: A playground that generates UI dynamically as you type in the Candid definitions. (Thanks to B3Forge)
We provide a test suite to check Candid implementations for compliance.
To make a release in this repo:
- Update
Changelog.mdand merge the PR into master. git tag 2020-04-01 -m "2020-04-01"git push origin 2020-04-01
The tag is always today's date. As the repo contains several targets, it is hard to give a version to the tag.
See our CONTRIBUTING and CODE OF CONDUCT to get started.