Loops and Guarding

Guards are needed to perform loops in a Hook.

What are guards?

Hooks are deliberately not Turing Complete. This means arbitrary looping is forbidden. Instead you must guard your loops against a hard "maximum iteration" boundary.

A guard is a marker placed in your code at the top of each loop. The marker informs the Xahau what the upper bound of your loop will be in every possible scenario. Thus if your loop usually executes twice but sometimes executes 500 times, then your guard will say 500.

Guards are used by the Xahau to determine the worst case execution time (in instructions) of your Hook before execution. This is the basis for the fee the Xahau charges for the execution of a Hook and makes execution times predictable and controllable.

🚧 Tip

Existing developers migrating from other smart contract platforms may find guards to be annoying at first but once you get used to them they are no harder to use than a normal for-loop.

The guard function

The guard function tells the ledger the maximum number of iterations a loop will make. Specifically the function takes two arguments:

int32_t _g (uint32_t id, uint32_t maxiter);

The first argument id is the identifier for this guard. This is a unique constant chosen by the developer, typically the line number in the source file is used.

The second argument maxiter is a promise the developer makes to the ledger that this guard will not be hit more than maxiter times during the execution of the Hook. If the guard call is executed more than this many times the Hook will automatically rollback with a GUARD_VIOLATION (Hook API return codes). Because the guard will be hit before the loop condition is checked, it is important to add one to the total number of expected iterations. (Note: The GUARD() macro already adds one).

❗️ Pay Attention

Guards must be set using numerical literals. You cannot use a variable or runtime value in a Guard.

Guard enforcement

Consider the following for-loop in C:

#define GUARD(maxiter) _g(__LINE__, (maxiter)+1)
for (int i = 0; GUARD(3), i < 3; ++i)
{
  ...
}

In C, the comma operator executes each expression in a list of expressions (e.g. A, B, C) and returns the last expression (e.g. C). Thus the condition above is still i < 3, but the guard is called before the condition is checked. This is the only way to satisify the guard rule when using a for-loop in C.

👍 The Guard Rule

A call to _g (the guard function) is must be the first branch instruction after a loop instruction.

Below appears the webassembly output when the above is compiled. Note the guard function being called at the start of the loop. The only instructions allowed before this call are non-branch instructions (typically manipulating constants.)

    block  ;; label = @1
      loop  ;; label = @2
        i32.const 3
        i32.const 14
=====>  call $_g          <=====
        drop
        ...

Nested Loops

When using nested loops the maxiter argument must reflect the total number of times the guard will be hit. This means you must multiply the nestings together.

Consider the example below:

#define GUARD(maxiter) _g(__LINE__, (maxiter)+1)
for (int i = 0; GUARD(3), i < 3; ++i)
{
  for (int j = 0; GUARD(15), j < 5; ++j)
  {
    ...
  }
}

Notice the inner-loop's guard is set to 15. You must multiply the loops together to compute the maximum number of times an inner guard will be hit during Hook execution.

No recursion

Calls to non-Hook API functions are disallowed in the Hooks ammendment. All user code must fit within the two allowed Hook functions cbak and hook.

❗️ Warning

Failure to use guards correctly will cause an attempted SetHook transaction to be rejected.