# Message-based Paradigm

## Message Format
For the moment, Mixnet clients work assuming they will be piped atomic messages looking something like this:

```
MixnetMessage {
  Message: Message_Bytes,
  To: Nym_Address,
  Attached_SURBS: Number_Of_Surbs
}
```

That the client will then encrypt as Sphinx packets and send through the Mixnet.

Likewise, they assume that once they have received and decrypted a Sphinx packet, they will kick back a reconstructed message to the rest of your app logic that look something like:

```
ReconstructedMessage {
  Message: Message_Bytes,
  From: SURB_Sender_Tag
}
```

This is obviously quite different to e.g. simply being able to read/write from a stream returned from a function call to create a TCP connection, but there are several approaches that developers can take to dealing with this right now.

## Message Abstractions
- Rust/Go (and soon C++) developers can use the `TcpProxy` [stream abstraction](../rust/tcpproxy).
- Developers who are using Typescript/Javascript can also avoid having to deal directly with messages via using [MixFetch](../typescript/examples/mix-fetch).
- As can developers who are bundling and running the standalone [socks5 client](../clients/socks5) using some form of init script.
- There is a seperate pair of binaries which other developers can use to run as a persistent secondary proxy process built using the `TcpProxy` abstraction. These simply expose a `localhost` socket port to pipe traffic to and from in the same way as you would a TCP connection and can be found [here](https://github.com/nymtech/standalone-tcp-proxies).
