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Solana

  • Stack Machine

    • In the stack machine, data is available at the top of the stack by default.
    • The stack acts as a source and destination, push and pop instructions are used to access instructions and data from the stack.
    • There is no need to pass the source and destination address because the default address is on top of the stack.
    • In the stack machine, there is no need to pass explicit addresses in the instruction.
    • Therefore the instruction format consists only of the OPCODE (Operation Code) field.
    • This instruction format is known as Zero address instruction
    • Software stack machines re-emerge as blockchain and web streaming become popular
    • Stack machines boast better code density than register machines
    • Stack machine is much simpler than register machines
    • Examples: WebAssembly, TelegramVM, EthereumVM
    • Traditional stack machine code gens are AST-based
    • Missing aggressive optimizations
    • LLVM is missing some key infrastructures for stack machine codegen
    • Repurposing LLVM to emit stack code is intuitively challenging (but doable)
    • Public WASM backend is an attempt but its methodology is rudimentary and not canonical
    • LLVM is not traditionally good with code size optimization -- need a lot of tunings.

  • EVM ( Ethereum Virtual Machine )

    • Stack machine with 256-bit word length
    • Deterministic: no heap, GC, multithreading, floating point, external variables, dynamic jumps
    • Has blockchain-specific instructions
    • Executing each bytecode instruction costs “gas”

  • Solidity and Vyper are the only two smart contract languages

    • Solidity is criticized for its bad and unsafe design, and its compiler is not-standardized
    • Vyper is simplistic and Python-based
    • After 5 years we are still not seeing other DSLs emerging. Mostly because the platform needs something like LLVM

  • Most stack machines are designed for size-sensitive scenarios: (eg. blockchain)

  • Register allocation pass is replaced by Stackification pass

    • Register-based Instr
    • Stack-based Instr
    • Mapping - (reg -> stack)

  • Neon EVM enables dApss to harness advantages from both blockchains

  • Ethereum in terms of tools used, and Solana in terms of low gas fees and high throughput

  • Generating Stack Machine Code using LLVM

  • Type of Instructions

    • A stack-based computer does not use the address field in the instruction.
    • To evaluate an expression first it is converted to reverse Polish Notation i.e. Postfix Notation.
    • Then instructions without any address used for operations

  • Solana Funbdamentals

References