Concepts
This chapter explains how MortarMQ works and why it is built that way. Read it once after the quick start, then return to individual pages when a behaviour surprises you.
Everything here is narrative — no copy-paste commands. For those, see Guides; for exact tables and registries, see Reference.
In this chapter
| Page | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Core concepts | The message model — topic, partition, group, epoch, credit, quorum, DLQ: what each noun means |
| Architecture | What the source packages do, which way dependencies point, and where the diagram atlas lives |
| Message loss | Under exactly what conditions a message can be lost, and the identity that proves it did not |
| Duplicate delivery | When the second copy arrives, and how to make a handler tolerate it |
| Ordering | What order is guaranteed, where it stops, and how to design around the boundary |
| Security | What v0 defends against, what it explicitly does not, and how the token handshake works |
| Glossary | The naming rules: magic bytes, the eight epoch-like counters, the ID system |
Planned pages
These land with the corresponding implementation and will be linked from here when they do:
- Storage internals — segment format, sparse index, checkpoint replay (the concepts page covers the behaviour; this would cover the bytes)
Related chapters
- The 9 mermaid diagrams that back these pages: Diagram atlas