Section: New Results

Software Engineering for BlockChain and Smart Contracts

Solidity Parsing Using SmaCC: Challenges and Irregularities. Solidity is a language used to implement smart contracts on a blockchain platform. Since its initial conception in 2014, Solidity has evolved into one of the major languages for the Ethereum platform as well as other blockchain technologies. Due to its popularity, there are many tools specifically designed to handle smart contracts written in Solidity. However , there is a lack of tools for Pharo to handle Solidity contracts. Therefore, we implemented a parser using SmaCC to serve as a base for further developing Solidity support in Pharo. We describe the parser creation, the irregularities we found in the Solidity grammar specification, and common practices on how to adapt the grammar to an LR type parser. Our experiences with parsing the Solidity language using SmaCC may help other developers trying to convert similar grammars. [32]

SmartInspect: Smart Contract Inspection. Smart contracts are embedded procedures stored with the data they act upon. Debugging deployed Smart Contracts is a difficult task since once deployed, the code cannot be reexecuted and inspecting a simple attribute is not easily possible because data is encoded. In this technical report, we present SmartInspect to address the lack of inspectability of a deployed contract. Our solution analyses the contract state by using decompilation techniques and a mirror-based architecture to represent the object responsible for interpreting the contract state. SmartInspect allows developers and also end-users of a contract to better visualize and understand the contract stored state without needing to redeploy, nor develop any ad-hoc code. [43]