1 Level
10 Review
8 Karma
Review on Zilliqa by Hoa Lieu
The language adopts certain design principles to make contracts tractable and…
The language adopts certain design principles to make contracts tractable and hence easier to reason about:
Separation between computation and communication: Every in-contract computation (e.g., changing its balance or computing a value of a function) is implemented as a standalone, atomic transition, i.e., without involving any other parties. Whenever such involvement is required (e.g., for transferring control to another party), a transition would end, with an explicit communication, by means of sending and receiving messages.
Separation between effectful and pure computations: Any in-contract computation happening within a transition has to terminate, and have a predictable effect on the state of the contract and the execution.
Separation between invocation and chained contract calls: The language only allows tail-calls, i.e., every call to an external function (i.e., another contract) has to be done as the absolutely last instruction.
Pros
- Contracts in Scilla are structured as communicating automata, i.e., a state machine that takes input from the external environment, performs some purely mathematical computations, change the state of the system and at the end (if needed) communicate with other contracts.
Cons
- Mainnet Launch Although the Mainnet had been scheduled for release in the third quarter of 2018, the team at Zilliqa have pushed the launch to December this year or in January next year.
