5 ms·

The original argument (not yours, to be fair) was that EVM/solidity + an optimizer are necessary because contracts are billed for gas. I was attempting to illus

The original argument (not yours, to be fair) was that EVM/solidity + an optimizer are necessary because contracts are billed for gas. I was attempting to illustrate that you can build a platform around a more representative billing system (you can pick one!) such that existing, world-class languages can be used instead. This pays security dividends and reduces the cost of your system (for everyone, not just you). Whether or not gas is a useful solution as-is isn't a particularly important question to me, and I don't see any reason why you'd want to replace it now. It's just a poor excuse for Solidity/EVM.

DennisP 9y ago
Sure, but I'm not aware of any language with an optimizer that minimizes permanent storage (for example). The gas model has been forced to be a close representation of actual costs, because last year it wasn't close enough, and someone took advantage of that to launch denial of service attacks. Incidentally, last year someone wrote an Idris backend compiling to EVM for their doctoral thesis. They concluded that it had some benefits but not as much as they expected. [1] There's an effort in progress to migrate from the existing EVM to a modified webassembly [2], which would allow usage of existing languages, and potentially improve performance significantly. It's still experimental and may or may not work out, but seems to be making good progress. [3] With the existing EVM there are new languages in development that may improve matters, including Viper [4] (by Vitalik) and Bamboo [5] (by someone the Ethereum Foundation employs to work on formal proofs). [1] https://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/234939/234939.pdf https://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/234939... [2] https://github.com/ewasm/evm2wasm https://github.com/ewasm/evm2wasm [3] https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/08/23/roundup-5/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/08/23/roundup-5/ [4] https://github.com/ethereum/viper https://github.com/ethereum/viper [5] https://github.com/pirapira/bamboo https://github.com/pirapira/bamboo

DennisP 9y ago

Sure, but I'm not aware of any language with an optimizer that minimizes permanent storage (for example). The gas model has been forced to be a close representation of actual costs, because last year it wasn't close enough, and someone took advantage of that to launch denial of service attacks. Incidentally, last year someone wrote an Idris backend compiling to EVM for their doctoral thesis. They concluded that it had some benefits but not as much as they expected. [1] There's an effort in progress to migrate from the existing EVM to a modified webassembly [2], which would allow usage of existing languages, and potentially improve performance significantly. It's still experimental and may or may not work out, but seems to be making good progress. [3] With the existing EVM there are new languages in development that may improve matters, including Viper [4] (by Vitalik) and Bamboo [5] (by someone the Ethereum Foundation employs to work on formal proofs). [1] https://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/234939/234939.pdf https://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/234939... [2] https://github.com/ewasm/evm2wasm https://github.com/ewasm/evm2wasm [3] https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/08/23/roundup-5/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/08/23/roundup-5/ [4] https://github.com/ethereum/viper https://github.com/ethereum/viper [5] https://github.com/pirapira/bamboo https://github.com/pirapira/bamboo