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A comment on Byzantine Fault Tolerant Raft With Smart Contracts. Parent comment

Re:Byzantine Fault Tolerant Raft With Smart Contracts by aakilfernandes on Wednesday March 02, 2016 @09:15PM (#11214618)
> I think thats the most i should say about the quality of the stack vm specification or its semantics

As someone who spends a lot of time with Ethereum, I'd love to hear more. Honestly, I almost never deal with the stack level language (only the higher level Solidity). Isn't it possible to write whatever language you like on top of that stack based language?

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Re:Byzantine Fault Tolerant Raft With Smart Contracts by cdetrio on Wednesday March 02, 2016 @11:37PM (#11215052)
There is a proposal[1] to upgrade the current EVM to a WebAssembly based VM. Since webAssembly has a llvm backend, any language with a llvm compiler (which is most of them) could be used to write contract code.

1. https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/48

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Re:Byzantine Fault Tolerant Raft With Smart Contracts by adrianm on Thursday March 03, 2016 @12:09AM (#11215143)
This is a vast oversimplification of the problem. LLVM is a compiler IR; nothing more. It is not portable (you cannot generate IR for one target and have it work for another target) and it does not trivially map to the semantics of most languages beyond C.

A programming language is a combination of many components; assembly optimization and target code generation is just one important part of a much larger picture.

I'm only responding critically because I've seen this trope that LLVM is some sort of universal programming language target way too often now. It misleads people into underestimating the scope of the actual problem. LLVM is not a panacea.

If you really want to make your platform programmable from any programming language, invest time into a well designed C API. Your users will thank you.

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Re:Byzantine Fault Tolerant Raft With Smart Contracts by cdetrio on Thursday March 03, 2016 @01:27AM (#11215355)
This is addressed in the linked issue.[1] Your criticism is the reason why (a subset of) WebAssembly is used, not LLVM IR.

1. https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/48#issuecomment-1690...

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Re:Byzantine Fault Tolerant Raft With Smart Contracts by carterschonwald on Thursday March 03, 2016 @09:25AM (#11216957)
theres also the issue that committing to too low level an IR really makes it hard to do nice optimizations in a portable way! :'(
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