Publish the ZoKrates interpreter and backend to crates.io

[Voxelot]

It'd be nice if part of the CI process not only built the docker images but also pushed to crates.io. This would make it far more convenient to use zokrates beyond CLI/Docker wrappers.

Docs for this are available here: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/publishing.html

[Schaeff]

Interesting. Do you have a specific use case in mind?

[Voxelot]

I'd like to be able to include zokrates core as a dependency from crates.io into rust-based webservice (e.g. actix). That way I can build a localized client-server app for performing a variety of proof generations for several different circuits.

A second usecase I'm thinking of would be including zokrates core into a project which wraps the APIs using rustwasm bindings for making it more browser compatible.

[Schaeff]

So you're mostly interested in running and proving, not the compiler itself, correct?

[Voxelot]

Yeah, no need to do on-the-fly compilation - proof generation would be the main use-case I have in mind. Although I'm sure publishing ZoKrates modules would be beneficial to others with different use-cases.

[Schaeff]

Right, that's what I thought. In that case a good start would be to extract the interpreter so that we can publish it on Crates.io.

[Voxelot]

Why not just publish the zokrates_core package as-is? Wouldn't this include the interpreter?

[Schaeff]

Yes it would, but in my opinion it's not quite ready to be used externally as a lib and it would be less work to make the interpreter ready as it's much smaller.

[alv-around]

What is the status of this issue? Is the help wanted still actual?

[titaniumtraveler]

Publishing to Crates.io would also have the upside that the docs would be easily available on docs.rs. Though for that reason it might be good to just publish all the packages. That way all the documentation would be available and could be linked to.