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Cardano smart contract language and toolchain

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Install

For now you'll need rust installed, see rustup.

cargo install aiken

Usage

For now the command line application can only encode/decode Untyped Plutus Core to/from it's on chain format. See the roadmap below for a list of planned features and goals.

# help
aiken help

# compile an untyped plutus core program to flat
aiken uplc flat program.uplc

aiken uplc flat program.uplc --print

# output
00001011 00010110 00100001 01001000
00000101 10000001

aiken uplc flat program.uplc --out=something.flat

# decode an untyped plutus core program from flat
aiken uplc unflat program.flat

aiken uplc unflat program.flat --print

# output
(program
  11.22.33
  (con integer 11)
)

aiken uplc unflat program.flat --out=something.uplc

Roadmap

In general, the goal is to port everything we need for plutus to Rust. This will be needed if we ever want to build a full node in Rust. Since we will have these tools natively in Rust, we plan on building a new high level language for writing smart contracts on Cardano. These are generic milestones and the listed ordering is not necessariy the implementation order or full scope.

• compile plutus core into it's on chain encoding
• reverse the on chain encoding into plutus core
• Plutus Core interpreter
• create a higher level syntax with inspiration from
  • JS
  • ReasonML
  • Elm
  • Roc
  • Rust
  • Gleam
• Language Server

Art Credit

We'd like to give a special thanks to @nkz for creating the logo and giving us the idea to name the project aiken.

Why Aiken?

The name comes from Howard Aiken, an American physicist and a pioneer in computing.

Resources

• Encoding/Decoding https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus/blob/master/plutus-core/untyped-plutus-core/src/UntypedPlutusCore/Core/Instance/Flat.hs
• Typing https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus/blob/master/plutus-core/untyped-plutus-core/src/UntypedPlutusCore/Core/Type.hs
• Serialization https://hydra.iohk.io/build/14133599/download/1/plutus-core-specification.pdf