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A Developer's Guide to Ethereum
book

A Developer's Guide to Ethereum

by Bruno Skvorc, Mateja Kendel, David Attard, Mislav Javor, Tonino Jankov, Chris Ward
August 2018
Beginner
172 pages
2h 36m
English
SitePoint
Content preview from A Developer's Guide to Ethereum

Chapter 8: Compiling and Smart Contracts: ABI Explained

by Mislav Javor

Most smart contracts are developed in a high-level programming language. The most popular currently is Solidity, with Vyper hoping to take the throne in the near future.

However, the mechanism driving Ethereum can’t understand the high-level languages, but instead talks in a much lower-level language.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)

Ethereum smart contracts are sets of programming instructions being run on all the nodes running a full Ethereum client. The part of Ethereum that runs the smart contract instructions is called the EVM. It’s a virtual machine not unlike Java’s JVM. The EVM reads a low-level representation of smart contracts called the Ethereum bytecode.

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781492069218Errata Page