The sBPF Programming Book

Patterns and idioms for writing Solana programs in pure assembly.

Every Solana program compiles down to sBPF, a deterministic 8-byte-instruction virtual machine derived from Berkeley Packet Filter. Anchor, Pinocchio, and native Rust are conveniences over the same target. This book teaches you to skip the conveniences when they cost too much.

You reach for sBPF assembly when audit clarity, sub-kilobyte binaries, byte-exact compute budgets, or the absence of a Rust runtime tax outweigh the ergonomics of a higher-level framework.

Read it

Live site: sbpf.dev.

What's inside

Section	What it covers
Getting Started	Install the toolchain, scaffold a project, build and deploy your first program
Assembly	Registers, memory, the instruction set, the stack, and syscalls. Everything you need to read and write asm.
Core Concepts	Program structure, account data, errors and logging, PDAs, CPI, creating accounts, a complete walkthrough, writing a client, deploying
Reference	Input region byte tables, instruction set reference, syscall catalogue, compute-unit costs, security pitfalls, example programs, contribution guide

Every chapter pairs an Anchor idiom (#[derive(Accounts)], CpiContext::new, etc.) with its sBPF equivalent, so an Anchor developer can map what they already know onto raw assembly.

Local development

bun install
bun run dev

Open http://localhost:3000/docs.

The dev server hot-reloads MDX content as you edit. Type-check after content edits:

bun run types:check

Production build

bun run build
bun run start

How the project is laid out

BOOK/
├── app/                       # Next.js App Router (layout + routes)
│   ├── (home)/                # marketing landing page
│   ├── docs/[[...slug]]/      # dynamic doc pages rendered from MDX
│   ├── api/search/            # full-text search endpoint
│   └── global.css             # Tailwind v4 entry + theme tokens
├── components/
│   ├── mdx.tsx                # MDX component overrides
│   └── layouts/shared.tsx     # nav title, GitHub URL
├── content/docs/              # all chapter MDX lives here
│   ├── meta.json              # top-level sidebar
│   ├── installation.mdx
│   ├── quickstart.mdx
│   ├── assembly/              # asm primer
│   ├── basics/                # Core Concepts chapters
│   ├── program-development/   # reference material
│   └── contributing/          # contribution guide
├── lib/
│   ├── source.ts              # fumadocs source loader
│   └── metadata.ts            # OpenGraph + Twitter defaults
├── source.config.ts           # fumadocs-mdx config
└── next.config.mjs            # Next.js config wrapping fumadocs MDX

Sidebar order is controlled by each directory's meta.json. Adding a new chapter is: drop an .mdx file under content/docs/..., add its slug to the relevant meta.json, run bun run dev.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests welcome. Before opening one, please read the Contribution Guide chapter (also rendered on the live site).

Short version of the rules:

• One concept per PR.
• # for asm comments, not ;.
• SCREAMING_CASE for .equ, snake_case for labels.
• No em-dashes.
• Run bun run types:check before pushing.

Acknowledgements

• blueshift-gg/sbpf for the assembler, the CLI, and the canonical example programs (sbpf-asm-counter, sbpf-asm-vault, sbpf-asm-cpi).
• solana-developers/program-examples for the beginner asm flavour examples (hello-solana, checking-accounts, create-account, transfer-sol).
• Fumadocs for the documentation framework.

License

MIT.