Config Lang

[blaggacao]

I know too little, but very fundamentally aren't smart contracts pure input/output functions on data?

If that is the case, there is promising neighbour in the rust ecosystem: https://github.com/tweag/nickel

It's quite a feature-full pure, functional config management language with interesting error reporting properties on the boundary between untyped and typed code via "contracts".

Maybe it would be not all too stupid to write a compiler for that (already existing and promising config language) into UPLC.

I'm learning here, so please teach me!

[rvcas]

@blaggacao I'm not sure I understand what you mean? We have quite a bit done and working. Not sure it would be a good idea to throw everything out and try to write a custom backend for nickel. It's maybe possible to do that but aiken already borrowed all of it's syntax from gleam

[blaggacao]

No, it wouldn't be a good idea. I agree and I didn't want to imply that, actually.

More generally though, I wonder about similarities and intersection points.

After all, these are all data-wrangler languages, as it seems.

On the other side, it might be an interesting hidden use case for nickel to be(come) a SmartContract config language (if it wants to).

On one hand, looking at aiken just happened to produce this faint association in me, strong enough to write it down.

Intersecting the config management tribe with the smart contracts tribe, on the other hand, does seem nothing more than a very remote match.

[blaggacao]

I essentially looked at this file and immediatly thought: "I know this"

[rvcas]

That makes sense. Nickel is definitely cool. I'm not sure I see the relationship between config languages and smart contract languages. They are similar in the sense that they are compilers and have a target output. But that's the very nature of a compiler in general, start with some source language and transform it into some target. Of course when considering tree-walking interpreters that's not necessarily the case but the point remains. I'm under the impression that config language execution/eval emits static config formats JSON, YAML, etc. Untyped Plutus Core isn't some static configuration, it is executed (or evaluated whatever) by a CekMachine in a Cardano node as part of transaction validation.