Jutus - Plutus for the masses

In "Jutus", "J" is from "Javascipt" and "utus" is from "Plutus". With "Javascript" we mean both Javascript and Typescript.

What

As a Plutus contract developer, I want to write my Smart Contracts in Javascript.

Why

The world has 25 million developers, and half of them use Javascript. The web is the global platform. So, let's write Plutus by writing in Javascript !

How?

We use both established and emerging open source components and glue them together in a most (cost-)effective way in order to produce an end-to-end compilation pipeline. Our strategy is as follows:

• We use swc to parse Javascript into their Abstract Syntax Tree (AST).
• We transform the swc AST to our own Intermediate Representation (IR).
• We compile our IR to aiken AST(s).
• We use aiken to type-check and compile to their Untyped Plutus Core (UPLC) representation. From here it should be straightforward (via aiken again) to generate the binary representation of UPLC.

You may want to check the section on architecture for a visualization of the above.

This is a feasibility study and a proof-of-concept, and, as such, not ready for production. But the results are positive, in the sense we prove that the original idea is doable. We can also take the whole work a step further by using our IR as a compilation target for other languages. For instance, one could write Plutus smart contracts in Python.

We chose Rust as the implementation language because everything we needed was already there in Rust. This is a very pragmatic and modern language with a huge ecosystem.

Please check the examples folder if you want to follow the logic of how everything fits together. The whole compilation pipeline can also be seen encoded as pub fn end_to_end in js_compiler.rs.

Architecture

Here is the general compilation pipeline architecture. Dotted lines denote something enabled by this project but not implemented yet.

flowchart LR
    subgraph "Front-end"
      A
      AA
      AAA
    end

    subgraph "Front-end AST"
      B
      BBB
    end

    A([Typescript])  --> B([swc AST])
    AA([Javascript]) --> B
    B                --> C([jutus IR])

    AAA(Language X) -..-> BBB("X" AST)
    BBB         -..-> C

    C --> D([aiken untyped AST])
    D --> E([aiken typed AST])
    E --> F([aiken UPLC AST])
    F -..-> G([UPLC binary format])

    subgraph "Back-end AST"
      F
    end