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A curated collection of resources on smart contract programming languages

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Overview

This is a curated collection of resources on specialized programming languages executed by decentralized peer-to-peer networks, also known as blockchains.

Let us define a smart contract, or simply contract, as a piece of code created by a blockchain user and executed by a blockchain node. A smart contract language (SCL) is a programming language that is either used to write a smart contract directly, or is compiled to it.

Programming languages differ on multiple dimensions, such as paradigm and type system. Due to a very unusual execution environment, SCLs have a different set of trade-offs compared to earlier languages. This spawned multiple attempts at creating secure and expressive SCLs.

Pre-Bitcoin

Bitcoin

  • Bitcoin Script - a stack-based non Turing complete Forth-like language used to write script that determine whether a UTXO can be spent.
  • Ivy - a non Turing complete higher-level language that compiles to Bitcoin Script (announcement)
  • sCrypt - a TypeScript-based DSL that compiles to Bitcoin Script running on Bitcoin SV
  • Simplicity - a typed functional programming language utilizing combinators blog post, another one
  • BitML - a process calculus based language, compiles to Bitcoin script (article)
  • BALZaC - a high-level language based on the formal model proposed in [AB+18FC]
  • Miniscript - a language for writing (a subset of) Bitcoin Scripts in a structured way, enabling analysis, composition, generic signing and more
  • Sapio
  • Minsc - a high-level scripting language for expressing Bitcoin Script spending conditions based on Miniscript Policy

Ethereum

Active:

  • Ethereum bytecode - a Turing complete stack-based language executed by the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM)
  • Solidity - a high-level imperative statically typed language compiled to EVM. Docs
  • Vyper - a high-level language compiled to EVM (announcement of formal tools from RV). Docs
  • Fe - a language inspired by Vyper aiming to achieve its goals. Docs
  • eWASM - a restricted subset of WebAssembly for Ethereum contracts. Docs
  • Idris - a pure functional language with dependent types. Docs
  • Flint - a type-safe, contract-oriented programming language specifically designed for writing robust smart contracts on Ethereum
  • Formality - an efficient programming language featuring formal proofs
  • Huff - an efficient low-level language with macros
  • Lira - a declarative domain-specific language for defining simple yet highly complex financial contracts for EVM
  • Zinc - a language to write zero-knowledge circuits and ZKP-based smart contracts. Docs
  • Sway - a Rust-based Smart Contract Language

No updates after 2018:

  • Bamboo - a high-level "formal-verification-friendly" language compiled to EVM
  • Pyramid - An EVM backend for SICP Scheme
  • Lolisa - subset of Solidity
  • Logikon - an experimental language for smart contracts

No updates after 2017:

No updates after 2016:

  • L4 - a language "based on deontic modal logic", presented at Devcon 2 (Sep 2016)
  • Mutan - a C-like language compiled to EVM (deprecated)

IRs

  • Yul (ex JULIA, ex IULIA) - an intermediate language that can be compiled to bytecode for different backends.
  • Yul+ - a low-level, highly efficient extension to Yul
  • SlithIR - an intermediate representation that is used by Slither to enable high-precision analysis via a simple API. It supports taint and value tracking to enable detection of complex patterns.
  • Elle - The Elle source language, also known as Elle-Core, captures structured programming abstractions and enables their translation to Ethereum EVM bytecode through a verified compiler.

DSLs

  • Alacrity - a DSL for simple, formally-verified DApps
  • Ergo - Domain specific language for smart legal contracts
  • Sandcastle - a SQL Ethereum smart contract language
  • FSolidM - framework for visual programming of Finite State Machines
  • Findel - a non Turing complete financial DSL inspired by a S.P.Jones' work
  • the language from the paper by Egelund-Müller et al
  • Chorus - a financial contractual markup language by Firmo network
  • ADICO - a domain-specific language to support the contract modeling process
  • ink! - an embedded DSL for writing WebAssembly based smart contracts using the Rust programming language and targeting Substrate blockchains. Documentation
  • Reach - a DSL for trustworthy DApps that enables junior developers without years of experience. Documentation

Other blockchains

  • Move - a safe and flexible programming language for the Libra Blockchain
  • Michelson - a stack based and strongly typed domain-specific language (Tezos)
  • Liquidity - a high-level typed smart-contract language that strictly complies to Michelson security restrictions (Tezos)
  • fi (Tezos)
  • LIGO (Tezos)
  • Plutus - a pure functional language with user-defined data types and polymorphism (Cardano); compiles to Plutus Core (video)
  • Marlowe - a domain-specific language for smart contract language embedded in Plutus (Cardano)
  • Rholang - a reflective higher-order process calculus language (RChain)
  • Obsidian - a state-oriented language with linear types
  • DAML - a smart contract language of Digital Asset
  • Simvolio (Apla blockchain platform)
  • RIDE - a non Turing complete language infulenced by Scala and F# (Waves)
  • Scilla - an intermediate level language for verified smart contracts (Zilliqa)
  • TxVM (Chain)
  • IELE - a variant of LLVM specialized to execute smart contracts on the blockchain
  • Pact - a smart contract language with a Lisp syntax but Haskell-like types (Kadena)
  • Ledger Design Language - a modeling language for describing public ledgers
  • Sigma-State (Ergo)
  • Sophia - a strongly typed language in the ML family (Æternity)
  • Varna - a non Turing complete high-level language (Æternity)
  • Fift - a stack-based general purpose programming language optimized for TON Blockchain smart contracts (TON)
  • Clarity (Blockstack)
  • Ethermint (Cosmos)
  • Secure EcmaScript (Cosmos)
  • Kadenamint (Cosmos)
  • Rell (Chromia)
  • Solang - a new Solidity compiler written in rust which uses llvm as the compiler backend. Solang targets Substrate, Solana, ewasm, and Sawtooth. It is source compatible with Solidity 0.7
  • Convex Lisp - a Clojure-inspired decentralised smart contract language (ConvexVM)

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