animica-fastpow 1.0.1

Native SHA3-256 PoW nonce scanner for the Animica CPU miner

animica-fastpow

Native SHA3-256 proof-of-work nonce scanner for the Animica CPU miner.

The Animica CPU miner's hot loop is otherwise pure Python, which caps multi-core hashrate (the per-nonce Python overhead dominates). This package runs the loop in C with the GIL released, so each miner worker gets native hashrate.

import animica_fastpow as fp
assert fp.available()

# digest = SHA3-256(prefix || mix_seed || nonce.to_bytes(8, "little"))
# returns the first (nonce, digest) with int(digest, "big") <= target, else None
res = fp.scan(prefix, mix_seed, target_32_be, start_nonce, iterations)

The miner (animica.animica_cpu_miner_repoexact) imports this automatically and falls back to its pure-Python loop if the extension isn't installed — so it's an optional accelerator, never a hard requirement.

Install

pip install animica-fastpow         # prebuilt wheel (Linux/macOS/Windows)
pip install "animica[fast]"          # via the animica miner extra

From source (needs a C compiler — gcc/clang, or MSVC Build Tools on Windows):

pip install ./mining/native

Correctness

The C SHA3-256 is the public-domain tiny_sha3 (NIST SHA3, 0x06 padding) and is verified at build/test time to be byte-identical to Python's hashlib.sha3_256 and to the miner's digest_from_sign_bytes. A wrong hash would get every share rejected, so parity is checked, not assumed.

Performance

The self-contained keccak is portable (no OpenSSL dependency, so it ships as a single .pyd/.so with no external DLLs). A follow-up AVX2 4-way batched keccak is the path to a further ~4× per core.