Intents

essentials team built out two pieces recently, declarative execution environment (essentialvm) & constraint driven language (pint)

pint contracts are composed of a persistent storage block & a series of predicates which constrain how state transitions happen. state access is made explicit in predicates, identifier (counter) may constrain existing state, identifier w single-quote suffix (counter') may constrain next state.

vm itself is a 64 bit stack machine w two execution stages, one for loading storage variables into a tx buffer, the other for constraining values in the tx buffer. isa is minimal, w a handful of logical, arithmetic, elliptic curve, sha, storage, and control flow ops

note that state is not explicitly assigned to a single value, state is arbitrarily provided by solvers, predicates only constrain the bounds of what solvers submit

obligatory counter attached:

I love reading about new VM architectures. makes me wonder if there will eventually be a standard set of instructions with modular extensions in a similar spirit as riscv but for distributed execution, maybe with different flavours of word sizes

Interested in ZK, FHE, PUFs, hardware, system design, ai safety, and smart contact security.

Or maybe we'll come up with blockchain specific extensions to riscv itself and just run extended risc zero vms as l2s