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The thought behind the Vyper Challenge was to develop one thing that was designed on the language degree to naturally exhibit a excessive diploma of security. The mission was initially authored by Vitalik as a proof-of-concept substitute for Serpent, its predecessor, however shortly after its creation Vyper discovered itself with out a devoted maintainer. Fortunately, there have been enthusiastic group members that took up the torch and continued growth of the mission, and we (the EF Python Crew) turned re-involved within the mission for a while earlier this yr.
This fall, a preliminary safety audit was carried out by the Consensys Diligence workforce on the Python-based Vyper compiler. You can read the results for yourself here.
We encourage you to learn the report, nonetheless, there are two foremost take-aways.
- There are a number of severe bugs within the Vyper compiler.
- The codebase has a excessive degree of technical debt which can make addressing these points advanced.
For the reason that present Python-based Vyper implementation shouldn’t be but manufacturing prepared, it has been moved out of the ethereum github group into its personal group: vyperlang. The prevailing maintainers are planning to handle the problems independently as soon as once more, however we are going to proceed to observe the mission intently right here: > https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper
In the meantime, our workforce continues work on a Rust-based compiler in tandem. Extra on that beneath, however first, right here’s a bit extra on how we received to the place we’re at this time.
Over the course of this yr we labored with the mission maintainers to deal with enhancing the code high quality and structure of the mission. After a number of months of labor we have been skeptical that the python codebase was more likely to ship on the concept Vyper promised. The codebase contained a big quantity of technical and architectural debt, and from our perspective it did not appear to be the present maintainers have been targeted on fixing this.
Exploring Rust
Earlier this yr in August, we explored producing a model of the Vyper compiler constructed on essentially totally different structure. The aim was to put in writing a compiler in Rust that leverages the present work by the Solidity workforce and makes use of the YUL intermediate illustration to permit us to focus on EVM or EWASM throughout compilation. A Rust based mostly compiler could be simply compiled to WASM, making the compiler way more transportable than one based mostly in Python. By constructing on high of YUL we might get the EVM and EWASM compilation free of charge, solely requiring the compiler to deal with the transformation from a Vyper AST to YUL.
We have been sufficiently far together with our Rust based mostly Vyper compiler when the Python Vyper audit was launched, and have been assured within the directionl. The audit confirmed many considerations across the python codebase and helped to validate the course we have taken.
The work continues
That mentioned, the maintainers of the Python Vyper codebase do intend to proceed with the mission. Whereas we don’t plan to have continued involvement within the python codebase, we want them luck but in addition needed to make observe of current occasions to keep away from inadvertently signalling that the mission was secure to make use of.
So at current there are at present two “Vyper” compilers: The EF-supported work in the direction of constructing a compiler written in Rust to ship on the unique thought of Vyper, and the Python effort which can work independently towards the identical targets within the Python codebase. We’re hopeful that we are able to proceed working collectively in the direction of a single “Vyper” with a number of implementations, and we’ll maintain everybody updated because the mission strikes ahead.
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