The thought behind the Vyper Mission 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 alternative for Serpent, its predecessor, however shortly after its creation Vyper discovered itself and not using a devoted maintainer. Fortunately, there have been enthusiastic group 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 12 months.
This fall, a preliminary safety audit was carried out by the Consensys Diligence staff 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 most important 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 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 prevailing 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 immediately.
Over the course of this 12 months we labored with the mission maintainers to deal with bettering the code high quality and structure of the mission. After a couple of months of labor we have 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 prevailing maintainers have been targeted on fixing this.
Exploring Rust
Earlier this 12 months 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 prevailing 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 might be simply compiled to WASM, making the compiler rather more transportable than one primarily based in Python. By constructing on high of YUL we might get the EVM and EWASM compilation without spending a dime, 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 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 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 latest 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 concept 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 preserve everybody updated because the mission strikes ahead.
