Application Status
Status: Completed
Last updated: 01.02.2024
Submited by Radosław Rowicki, radrowicki at google’s 5-letter mail domain
Team: Gaith Hallak, Radosław Rowicki
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Open Source Development, Research and Education
Application Title
Sophia language and ecosystem development Q4-2023
Applicant
Radosław Rowicki (@radrow) and Gaith Hallak (@ghallak)
Value Application
Improvement of smart contract development on the æternity blockchain using Sophia and FATE.
Definition of Terms
- Sophia — most commonly used smart contract language for the æternity blockchain.
- FATE — smart contract runtime system on the æternity blockchain.
- Compiler — translator between a high-level language (here; Sophia) to a low level language executed by a machine (here; FATE).
- Language ecosystem — a collective term for various tools integrated to work together for software production in a given language.
Status Quo
Sophia is a well designed language and is convenient for smart contract development. Unfortunately, the means utilizing it in professional use cases lack some maturity or external functionalities, especially regarding editor support and testing. Moreover, the language still has some parts which are underdeveloped, and while it does not drastically hinder its usability, it makes it harder to adapt by programmers not familiar with it.
Sophia developers are encouraged to use aestudio for smart contract development. While the editor is a legitimate tool, not everyone is fond of web-based editors. There is practically no alternative to it, unfortunately. While there are some extensions to VS Code, they offer little over syntax highlighting.
The REPL is a working tool and can be used for offline and online testing contracts. It supports basic debugging utilities which are accessible through a websocket layer. However, it lacks some features, especially regarding chain simulation and local variables.
Required Work
In the long term the following should be considered:
- Develop and maintain the debugger on demand
- Develop and maintain the REPL on demand
- Cover all top-level Sophia declarations
- Recursive functions
- Namespaces
- Contracts
- Multiple definitions in a single prompt
- Responsiveness polish
- Testing, fix all crashes
- Documentation
- Tutorials
- Cover all top-level Sophia declarations
- Develop the compiler
- Regular maintenance on demand
- Rewrite as a modularized device
- Design and implement parser as a tree-sitter grammar
- Compatibility layer between tree-sitter and actual AST representation
- Rewrite typechecker
- Redesign backend layers
- Expose code analysis features
- Editor support
- Language Server Protocol
- Integrate with REPL
Our focus in this application has been marked in bold.
Estimate
@ghallak will be working full time on this grant. @radrow will be allocating time during weekends and his free time to provide advice, code reviews, and might do development when required.
Known Limitations
Compiler construction requires a lot of expertise, research and overall engineering effort. The team is small, which hinders the pace.
Outlook
The points that are not marked in bold in the “Required work” section are the longer term goals that should be considered according to their priority in the future.
Publishment
We plan to publish our work in the official AE Github repositories. Project releases will be made by the end of this grant period. Some major changes or critical updates might require publishing new releases for certain projects before the end of the grant period.
Maintenance
Maintenance and bug fixes are part of this grant, and we will be providing bug fixes and updates as necessary to the projects that are developed under this grant.