GridZero - Capability Routing Grid (CRG)

Companion code to "Capability Routing Grid - From Decoupled Plugins to the Hardware Ceiling", Cyril Tissier's talk at CppCon 2026. Recording will be linked here once available.

Slides for the talk at CppCon2026

GridZero is a C++17 header-only toolkit for composing decoupled code across strictly segregated projects. NodeLink lets implementations register themselves - even across DLL boundaries - with no central registry and no Init() call; that alone is enough to build a plugin system, no routing tensor required. The capability router covers the other pole: bind behavior to model types through a flat tensor lookup instead of a vtable, and for a contract with no virtual methods that same lookup costs zero virtual calls and zero heap allocation - decoupled plugins to the hardware ceiling, as the talk title has it.

What is in this repository

This is the public tier of GridZero. It contains:

• crg_core - the complete routing engine (header-only, ~80 headers).
• Test stages - eight executable stages (00-07) that build up the framework layer by layer, plus the plugin_loadlibrary stage demonstrating manual-load plugins.

There is no managed loader, no hot-reload pipeline, no JIT compiler, and no WASM backend target in this repository - those live in a separate protected tier.

Quick build

cmake -S gridzero -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build
./build/crg/tests/core_monolith/Run_CoreMonolith_Tests
./build/crg/tests/plugin_loadlibrary/Run_PluginLoadLibrary_Tests

Requires a C++17 compiler. No external dependencies for crg_core.

The four layers

Layer	Headers	Concept
Discovery	crg/discovery/	NodeLink self-registration, plugin splice
Models	crg/models/, crg/core/	DenseID, domain, TypeHash
Capabilities	crg/capabilities/, crg/routing/	Tensor routing, DOD/Brain dispatch
Type erasure	crg/type_erasure/	ModelShell, Invoke/TryInvoke

See architecture.md for the full design rationale.

Test stages

Each stage is a self-contained .test.cpp + .md pair that introduces one concept:

Stage	Concept
00	NodeLink: linker-driven discovery
01	DenseID, ModelToken, domain
02	Muscle capability: DOD path, 0-D tensor, ~1 ns
03	Contextual routing: 1-D axis
04	N-D routing: Horner branchless offset
05	Brain capability: virtual interface, operator->
06	Dynamic rules: EarlyExit, UtilityScoring
07	ModelShell: type erasure + Invoke/TryInvoke
plugin_loadlibrary	Manual-load plugin: LoadLibrary + CRG_Bootstrap

License

Apache License 2.0 - see LICENSE (added at publication time).