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YulDSL - A DSL For Solidity/YUl

YulDSL provides an embedded domain-specific language (EDSL) called 'YulDSL' in Haskell that targets Solidiy/Yul code.

Motivation

They (the programming languages) also differ in physical appearance, and more important, in logical structure. The question arises, do the idiosyncracies reflect basic logical properties of the situations that are being catered for? Or are they accidents of history and personal background that may be obscuring fruitful developments?

— "The Next 700 Programming Languages" by P. J. Landin.

  • Many emerging ecosystems utilize specialized programming languages designed specifically for their needs. For example, the Solidity programming language is mainly for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ecosystem.

  • These new languages serve no purpose beyond programming for their specific ecosystems.

  • Meanwhile, advancements in programming language theories, especially type theory and category theory, continue.

  • Among these languages, a few have demonstrated the capability to embed a domain-specific language (EDSL) to solve a wide range of problems without having to build a new programming language toolchain.

  • To provide a safe, high-level programming language for the Ethereum smart contracts development ecosystem, the author embarked on a journey to create an EDSL in Haskell for such a purpose.

A DSL Based On Category Theory

The signature design choice for YulDSL is to base itself on category theory. In contrast to ones that base themselves on stack machines or lambda calculi.

In simple terms, this means that all the "nouns" of this language are the types of values, and all the "verbs" describe the transition from one type of value to another. Hence, a "verb" always connects two "nouns."

Following the analogy, each "sentence" has one verb, and "sentences" can be composed with each other by matching their "nouns" type to form a long "paragraph," aka. a program.

The advantage of such a construction hinges on a few prior works that, by providing a specific (namely, mathematically lawful) set of "verbs," you can convert from this language to a different domain. Notably, these are two known works of this fashion:

  1. "Compiling to Categories" by Conal Elliott (2017) shows how to compile simply typed lambda calculus as Haskell code to the cartesian closed category that models hardware circuits.

  2. "Evaluating Linear Functions to Symmetric Monoidal Categories" by Jean-Philippe Bernardy and Arnaud Spiwack (2021) explores the correspondence between linear types supported in Haskell and symmetric monoidal categories (SMC).

YulDSL/Haskell

YulDSL currently supports symmetric monoidal categories (SMC). Due to SMC's correspondence with linear types, according the work referenced above, "YulDSL/Haskell" utilizes the theory and makes it a safe programming experience for the Ethereum using linear types.

To learn more about the YulDSL/Haskell, read the README of its package.

Portable YulDSL Artifact

Caution

This is still at the ideation phase.

'YulDSL' can be serialized into a portable artifact, thereby enabling various front-ends, such as a visual programming interface or other YulDSL-supported programming languages to produce and share 'YulDSL' as portable modules with each other.