AIKEN

A cardano smart contract language and toolchain

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.

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

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