State of the Languages

Thank you for following the latest in Tezos smart contract language development. The last few weeks have been challenging, but we’re happy to see people use their time stuck in quarantine to learn and develop skills in writing Tezos smart-contracts!

Let us know if you have:

  • feedback or suggestions
  • a language you would like to add

Recent development

Albert

No recent updates from the Albert team.

Archetype

The Archetype team added

  • Crypto functions: blake2b, sha256, sha512 and check_signature
  • Functions concat, slice and length for string/bytes types

Then also worked on

  • SmartPy output
  • Fixing bugs

LIGO

The LIGO team worked on

  • Refactoring the code base for better JSON outputs (error/values)
  • The boilerplate generator.
    In the past we factorized parts of the code that were similar, but those parts are somewhat arbitrary and make refactoring and changes more difficult (if you need to update a common part for just one of its use cases, it becomes a problem). It was useful to reduce the amount of code while there was little automation; now that we can generate some parts of the boilerplate we can start to bring back each AST in a single file without grouping the common parts of the AST in a separate file.
  • A pure OCaml substitute for cpp, which is now under unit testing before integration and release.
    Currently, the LIGO compiler relies on the C preprocessor (cpp) to textually combine several contracts into one by means of the #include directive, and perform the conditional compilation of contracts by means of the #if directive. The use of a preprocessor is meant as a temporary solution until a proper module system is designed which will enable the type-safe composition of contracts based on their abstract representations. In the meantime, cpp is an external dependency of the LIGO compiler, and a relatively large piece of software, so the substitute will make the LIGO distribution lighter.

SCaml

The SCaml team has nothing special to report for SCaml this time. They are busy with main core development.

SmartPy

No recent updates from the SmartPy team.


Thank you for reading, and check back soon for our next update!

Eowyn on behalf of the LIGOlang team

1 Like