[Haskell-cafe] Haskell to Ethereum VM ?

Sat Jan 27 01:22:19 UTC 2018

Probably you are aware of Cardano (https://www.cardanohub.org/en/home/), a
new generation blockchain platform which uses languages inspired from
Haskell. From the whitepaper at https://whycardano.com/:

"Systems such as Bitcoin provide an extremely inflexible and draconian
scripting language that is difficult to program bespoke transactions in, and
to read and understand. Yet the general programmability of languages such as
Solidity introduce an extraordinary amount of complexity into the system and
are useful to only a much smaller set of actors. 

Therefore, we have chosen to design a new language called Simon6
<https://whycardano.com/#footnote6>  in honor of its creator Simon Thompson
and the creator of the concepts that inspired it, Simon Peyton Jones. Simon
is a domain-specific language that is based upon Composing contracts:
<https://www.lexifi.com/files/resources/MLFiPaper.pdf> an adventure in
financial engineering.

The principal idea is that financial transactions are generally composed
from a collection of foundational elements7
<https://whycardano.com/#footnote7> . If one assembles a financial periodic
table of elements, then one can provide support for an arbitrarily large set
of compound transactions that will cover most, if not all, common
transaction types without requiring general programmability.

The primary advantage is that security and execution can be extremely well
understood. Proofs can be written to show correctness of templates and
exhaust the execution space of problematic transaction events, such as the
creation of new money out of thin
<https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident> air or transaction
<https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_Malleability> malleability. Second,
one can leave in extensions to add more elements by way of soft forks if new
functionality is required.

That said, there will always be a need to connect CSL to overlay protocols,
legacy financial systems, and special purpose servers. Thus we have
developed Plutus <https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-prototype>  as
both a general purpose smart contract language and also a special purpose
DSL for interoperability.

Plutus is a typed functional language based on concepts from Haskell, which
can be used to write custom transaction scripts. For CSL, it will be used
for complex transactions required to add support for other layers we need to
connect, such as our sidechains scheme."

  _____  

From: Haskell-Cafe [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of
Takenobu Tani
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2018 8:05 PM
To: Patrick Mylund Nielsen
Cc: haskell-cafe
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell to Ethereum VM ?

Hi Carter, Patrick,

Thank you for reply.
Quorum is interesting!
It would be very nice to be able to describe Ethereum's contract with
Haskell DSL.
The characteristics about immutable and type will fit DApps.

Thank you very much,
Takenobu

2018-01-27 2:55 GMT+09:00 Patrick Mylund Nielsen <haskell at patrickmn.com>:

The Quorum[1] team has been dreaming about such a
Haskell-beginner-friendly bytecode-generating DSL for a very long time.
The user experience of writing applications in a language where pitfalls
are so non-obvious is one of the biggest pain points of Ethereum in general.

We would warmly welcome something like this, and would definitely look
to use it in Quorum. (Our EVM is the same as public Ethereum.)

[1]: A permissioned/non-PoW version of Ethereum with high throughput and
privacy - https://github.com/ <https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum/>
jpmorganchase/quorum/

On 1/26/2018 11:43 AM, Carter Schonwald wrote:
> Hello Takenobu, 
> while theres definitely a lot of haskell code out there that deals with
> ethereum (or implementing it!), i'm not aware of anything targeting the
> evm isa from haskell or any other mature functional programming language
>
> On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 8:09 AM, Takenobu Tani <takenobu.hs at gmail.com

> <mailto:takenobu.hs at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi cafe,
>
>     Does anyone know about the code generator from Haskell's syntax to
>     Ethereum VM language (bytecode)?
>     That is, what corresponds to Solidity in Haskell.
>
>     Although Solidity is interesting, it's difficult for me to achieve
>     quality and safety.
>     Does such a project already exist?
>
>     Regards,
>     Takenobu
>
>
>
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