Knafeh

A high-performance QUIC-based RPC framework written in Rust with first-class Python bindings.

Knafeh provides two transport backends — raw QUIC (quinn) for maximum throughput and HTTP/3 (tokio-quiche) for gRPC compatibility — with pluggable codecs, middleware, server-streaming, and connection pooling.

Features

• Dual transport — Raw QUIC (~13K rpc/s) or HTTP/3 (~4K rpc/s), selectable per use case
• Pluggable codecs — Protobuf (default), JSON, or implement the Codec trait
• Unary & server-streaming RPCs — with length-prefixed framing for HTTP/3 streams
• Middleware — Interceptor trait for auth, logging, tracing, rate limiting
• Connection pooling — QUIC-native multiplexing with automatic reconnection
• Retries — RetryPolicy with exponential backoff, jitter, status-code awareness
• Python bindings — Native async (pyo3-async-runtimes) + sync API, anyio structured concurrency
• gRPC-compatible status codes — 17 standard codes with proper error propagation

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.94+
• Python >= 3.13 (for Python bindings)
• maturin (for building Python wheels)

Generate TLS Certificates

QUIC requires TLS. For development, generate a self-signed cert:

openssl req -x509 -newkey ec -pkeyopt ec_paramgen_curve:prime256v1 \
    -keyout key.pem -out cert.pem -days 365 -nodes -subj '/CN=localhost'

Tests generate certs automatically via rcgen — no manual setup needed.

Rust — HTTP/3 Server + Client

use knafeh::server::Server;
use knafeh::codec::JsonCodec;
use knafeh::transport::tls::TlsConfig;

let server = Server::builder()
    .bind_str("0.0.0.0:4433")?
    .tls(TlsConfig::server("cert.pem", "key.pem"))
    .codec(JsonCodec::new())
    .add_service(my_service)
    .build()?;

server.serve().await?;

use knafeh::client::Client;
use knafeh::codec::JsonCodec;

let client = Client::builder()
    .endpoint("localhost:4433")
    .codec(JsonCodec::new())
    .build()
    .await?;

let response = client.call("greeter/say_hello", body).await?;

Rust — Raw QUIC (maximum performance)

use knafeh::transport::quic_native::{QuicClient, QuicServer};

// Server
let server = QuicServer::bind(addr, &cert_pem, &key_pem, router, codec, middleware)?;
server.serve().await?;

// Client
let client = QuicClient::connect_insecure(addr, codec, middleware).await?;
let response = client.call("echo/echo", body).await?;

Python — Async Client

from knafeh import Client, TlsConfig

async with Client("localhost:4433", tls=TlsConfig.client_insecure()) as client:
    response = await client.call("greeter/say_hello", b'{"name": "World"}')

    # Batch concurrent calls with structured cancellation (anyio TaskGroup)
    responses = await client.call_many("echo/echo", [b'msg1', b'msg2', b'msg3'])

Python — Sync Client (scripts, notebooks)

from knafeh import SyncClient

with SyncClient("localhost:4433") as client:
    response = client.call("echo/echo", b"hello")
    for chunk in client.server_stream("count/count", b'{"count": 5}'):
        print(chunk)

Python — Server

from knafeh import Server, TlsConfig

server = Server("0.0.0.0:4433", tls=TlsConfig.server("cert.pem", "key.pem"))

@server.service("greeter")
class Greeter:
    def say_hello(self, request: bytes) -> bytes:
        import json
        name = json.loads(request)["name"]
        return json.dumps({"message": f"Hello, {name}!"}).encode()

await server.serve()

Building & Testing

# Rust crate (Python bindings are opt-in via the python feature)
cargo build
cargo test

# Python
uv sync --python 3.13 --group dev
PYO3_USE_ABI3_FORWARD_COMPATIBILITY=1 uv run maturin develop --features python
uv run pytest tests/test_knafeh.py -v

# Performance benchmarks (release mode)
cargo test --no-default-features --release --test e2e_perf_test -- --ignored --nocapture

TLS certificates are generated at runtime via rcgen — no manual cert setup needed for tests.

Releasing

Releases are published by the GitHub Actions release workflow when a semver tag like v1.0.0 is pushed. Before tagging, update the matching versions in Cargo.toml and pyproject.toml. For an existing tag, run the workflow manually and provide the tag value.

Required repository secrets:

• CARGO_REGISTRY_TOKEN for crates.io
• PYPI_TOKEN for PyPI

The workflow publishes the Rust crate and Linux x86_64 PyPI wheels for Python 3.13 and 3.14.

Performance

Benchmarked on localhost, release mode, 10K sequential requests:

Parallel (32 in-flight): Raw QUIC reaches 104K rpc/s, HTTP/3 reaches 15K rpc/s.

See docs/E2E_TESTING_REPORT_v1.0.0.md for full benchmark results including codec comparisons, Python client/server benchmarks, and external framework comparisons.

License

Apache-2.0