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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