The thought behind the Vyper Challenge was to develop one thing that was designed on the language stage to naturally exhibit a excessive diploma of security. The venture 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 improvement of the venture, and we (the EF Python Crew) grew to become re-involved within the venture 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, nevertheless, there are two major take-aways.
- There are a number of severe bugs within the Vyper compiler.
- The codebase has a excessive stage of technical debt which can make addressing these points complicated.
For the reason that present Python-based Vyper implementation just isn’t but manufacturing prepared, it has been moved out of the ethereum github group into its personal group: vyperlang. The present maintainers are planning to deal with the problems independently as soon as once more, however we are going to proceed to comply with the venture carefully right here: > https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper
In the meantime, our workforce continues work on a Rust-based compiler in tandem. Extra on that under, however first, right here’s a bit extra on how we obtained to the place we’re in the present day.
Over the course of this yr we labored with the venture maintainers to concentrate on enhancing the code high quality and structure of the venture. After a number of months of labor we have been skeptical that the python codebase was prone 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 prevailing 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 basically completely different structure. The purpose was to put in writing a compiler in Rust that leverages the prevailing 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 will be simply compiled to WASM, making the compiler rather more transportable than one based mostly in Python. By constructing on high of YUL we might get the EVM and EWASM compilation totally free, 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 route we have taken.
The work continues
That stated, the maintainers of the Python Vyper codebase do intend to proceed with the venture. Whereas we don’t plan to have continued involvement within the python codebase, we want them luck but additionally needed to make word of current occasions to keep away from inadvertently signalling that the venture was protected to make use of.
So at current there are presently two “Vyper” compilers: The EF-supported work in 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 will proceed working collectively in direction of a single “Vyper” with a number of implementations, and we’ll hold everybody updated because the venture strikes ahead.