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 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 no devoted maintainer. Fortunately, there have been enthusiastic neighborhood members that took up the torch and continued improvement of the mission, and we (the EF Python Workforce) grew to become re-involved within the mission for a while earlier this yr.
This fall, a preliminary safety audit was carried out by the Consensys Diligence staff on the Python-based Vyper compiler. You may learn the outcomes for your self right here.
We encourage you to learn the report, nevertheless, there are two most important take-aways.
- There are a number of critical bugs within the Vyper compiler.
- The codebase has a excessive stage of technical debt which can make addressing these points complicated.
Because the current Python-based Vyper implementation will not be 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 observe the mission intently right here: > https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper
In the meantime, our staff 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 at present.
Over the course of this yr we labored with the mission maintainers to concentrate on enhancing the code high quality and structure of the mission. After just a few 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 seem to be the present maintainers have been centered on fixing this.
Exploring Rust
Earlier this yr in August, we explored producing a model of the Vyper compiler constructed on essentially completely different structure. The purpose was to write down a compiler in Rust that leverages the present work by the Solidity staff and makes use of the YUL intermediate illustration to permit us to focus on EVM or EWASM throughout compilation. A Rust primarily based compiler may be simply compiled to WASM, making the compiler far more transportable than one primarily based in Python. By constructing on high of YUL we’d 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 primarily based 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 notice of current occasions to keep away from inadvertently signalling that the mission was protected to make use of.
So at current there are presently 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 objectives 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 preserve everybody updated because the mission strikes ahead.
