The thought behind the Vyper Venture was to develop one thing that was designed on the language degree 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 and not using a devoted maintainer. Fortunately, there have been enthusiastic neighborhood members that took up the torch and continued growth of the venture, and we (the EF Python Staff) turned 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, nonetheless, there are two principal take-aways.
- There are a number of critical bugs within the Vyper compiler.
- The codebase has a excessive degree of technical debt which can make addressing these points complicated.
For the reason that current Python-based Vyper implementation is just not but manufacturing prepared, it has been moved out of the ethereum github group into its personal group: vyperlang. The prevailing maintainers are planning to deal with the problems independently as soon as once more, however we’ll proceed to observe the venture 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 bought to the place we’re in the present day.
Over the course of this yr we labored with the venture maintainers to deal with bettering the code high quality and structure of the venture. After a number of months of labor we had been skeptical that the python codebase was prone to ship on the concept that Vyper promised. The codebase contained a big quantity of technical and architectural debt, and from our perspective it did not seem to be the present maintainers had been centered 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 objective was to jot down 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 rather more transportable than one based mostly in Python. By constructing on high of YUL we might get the EVM and EWASM compilation at no cost, solely requiring the compiler to deal with the transformation from a Vyper AST to YUL.
We had been sufficiently far together with our Rust based mostly Vyper compiler when the Python Vyper audit was launched, and had been assured within the directionl. The audit confirmed many issues across the python codebase and helped to validate the path 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 wished to make be aware of current occasions to keep away from inadvertently signalling that the venture was protected to make use of.
So at current there are at the moment 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 will proceed working collectively in the direction of a single “Vyper” with a number of implementations, and we’ll preserve everybody updated because the venture strikes ahead.
