lip-core

Rust library crate for LIP — Linked Incremental Protocol, a persistent, incremental code intelligence daemon.

This crate contains the daemon runtime, query graph, WAL journal, Tier 1/2/3 indexers, MCP/LSP wire protocol, semantic embedding layer, and registry client. It is the engine behind the lip-cli binary.

Usage

Add to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
lip = { package = "lip-core", version = "2.0.1" }

The package alias lip keeps import paths clean:

use lip::daemon::LipDaemon;
use lip::query_graph::{ClientMessage, ServerMessage};
use lip::schema::OwnedSymbolInfo;

Links

• Documentation
• Protocol Spec
• GitHub
• lip-cli on crates.io

License

MIT

lib.rs:

LIP — Linked Incremental Protocol

Rust reference implementation of LIP v1.3.

LIP is a language-agnostic protocol for streaming, incremental code intelligence. It is designed as a successor to LSP (runtime queries) and SCIP (static snapshots), combining lazy query graphs with a content-addressed dependency registry.

Quick start

# Start the daemon (watches files, persists to WAL journal)
lip daemon --socket /tmp/lip.sock

# Index a directory (Tier 1, tree-sitter)
lip index ./src

# Query definition at a position
lip query definition file:///src/main.rs 42 10

# Start the LSP bridge (standard LSP, no editor plugin needed)
lip lsp --socket /tmp/lip.sock

# Start the MCP server (AI agents: Claude Code, CKB, Cursor, …)
lip mcp --socket /tmp/lip.sock

# Semantic nearest-neighbour search (requires LIP_EMBEDDING_URL)
lip query embedding-batch file:///src/auth.rs
lip query nearest         file:///src/auth.rs --top-k 5

Crate layout

Confidence tiers

Semantic embeddings (v1.3)

When LIP_EMBEDDING_URL points to an OpenAI-compatible endpoint (e.g. Ollama, OpenAI, Together AI), the daemon can store dense embedding vectors per file and answer cosine nearest-neighbour queries:

LIP_EMBEDDING_URL=http://localhost:11434/v1/embeddings
LIP_EMBEDDING_MODEL=nomic-embed-text   # optional; defaults to text-embedding-3-small

Use ClientMessage::EmbeddingBatch to populate vectors, then ClientMessage::QueryNearest or ClientMessage::QueryNearestByText to search. Embedding is optional — all other LIP features work without it.

Wire format

All IPC uses 4-byte big-endian length-prefixed JSON over a Unix domain socket. The FlatBuffers zero-copy path (daemon::mmap) is implemented but unused until v0.2.