alice699/thru-alphanet-guestbook-starter

This repository is a minimal starter project for building and deploying C programs on Thru Alphanet, an early test network for a blockchain platform called Thru. It walks through a complete working flow: installing the Thru command line tool and C software development kit, compiling C programs into ThruVM binaries, deploying those programs to the alphanet, sending transactions to them, and reading back the events they produce. The author is explicit that this is an experimental alphanet project, not a finished application people should build a real product on top of. The repo contains two example programs. The first is a simple counter that exists to prove the whole toolchain works: it can be built, deployed, given its own on-chain state account, incremented through a transaction, and it emits an event showing the new value. The second is called Guestbook V1, a minimal program that accepts a text message as input and emits that same message back as a readable on-chain event, rather than storing a full history of messages in its state. The goal of both examples is to demonstrate the path from a C program to a deployed, working alphanet contract with an event explorers can read, not to build production features. Getting started requires Linux, macOS, or WSL, plus Node.js 18 or newer, since the Thru CLI installs through npm. After installing the CLI, toolchain, and C SDK, a user generates a local key pair and creates an alphanet account, then builds the example programs with make. The README walks through, step by step, the exact byte-level instruction formats each program expects, including how a message gets encoded with its type and length before being submitted as a transaction, and includes ready-to-run shell scripts for incrementing the counter and posting a guestbook message. The repository also documents how to work with ABI files, which describe a program's interface so tools like Thru's block explorer can decode its data. It includes both a source ABI file and a version prepared for publishing, along with the commands to analyze, prepare, and publish them. A checklist near the end confirms which steps have been verified working on the alphanet, and the README notes plainly that the current guestbook version has no frontend and does not keep a full message history.