  Sparse superposition (SS) codes were originally proposed as a
capacity-achieving communication scheme over the additive white Gaussian noise
channel (AWGNC) [1]. Very recently, it was discovered that these codes are
universal, in the sense that they achieve capacity over any memoryless channel
under generalized approximate message-passing (GAMP) decoding [2], although
this decoder has never been stated for SS codes. In this contribution we
introduce the GAMP decoder for SS codes, we confirm empirically the
universality of this communication scheme through its study on various channels
and we provide the main analysis tools: state evolution and potential. We also
compare the performance of GAMP with the Bayes-optimal MMSE decoder. We
empirically illustrate that despite the presence of a phase transition
preventing GAMP to reach the optimal performance, spatial coupling allows to
boost the performance that eventually tends to capacity in a proper limit. We
also prove that, in contrast with the AWGNC case, SS codes for binary input
channels have a vanishing error floor in the limit of large codewords.
Moreover, the performance of Hadamard-based encoders is assessed for practical
implementations.
