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neoneo-go/docs/compiler.md

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NEO-GO smart contract compiler

The neo-go compiler compiles Go programs to bytecode that the NEO virtual machine can understand.

Language compatibility

The compiler is mostly compatible with regular Go language specification, but there are some important deviations that you need to be aware of that make it a dialect of Go rather than a complete port of the language:

  • new() is not supported, most of the time you can substitute structs with composite literals
  • make() is supported for maps and slices with elements of basic types
  • copy() is supported only for byte slices, because of underlying MEMCPY opcode
  • pointers are supported only for struct literals, one can't take an address of an arbitrary variable
  • there is no real distinction between different integer types, all of them work as big.Int in Go with a limit of 256 bit in width, so you can use int for just about anything. This is the way integers work in Neo VM and adding proper Go types emulation is considered to be too costly.
  • goroutines, channels and garbage collection are not supported and will never be because emulating that aspects of Go runtime on top of Neo VM is close to impossible
  • defer and recover are supported except for cases where panic occurs in return statement, because this complicates implementation and imposes runtime overhead for all contracts. This can easily be mitigated by first storing values in variables and returning the result.
  • lambdas are supported, but closures are not.
  • maps are supported, but valid map keys are booleans, integers and strings with length <= 64

VM API (interop layer)

Compiler translates interop function calls into NEO VM syscalls or (for custom functions) into NEO VM instructions. Refer to pkg.go.dev for full API documentation. In general it provides the same level of functionality as Neo .net Framework library.

Compiler provides some helpful builtins in util and convert packages. Refer to them for detailed documentation.

_deploy() function has a special meaning and is executed when contract is deployed. It should return no value and accept single bool argument which will be true on contract update. _deploy() functions are called for every imported package in the same order as init().

Quick start

Go setup

The compiler uses Go parser internally and depends on regular Go compiler presence, so make sure you have it installed and set up. On some distributions this requires you to set proper GOROOT environment variable, like

export GOROOT=/usr/lib64/go/1.14

Compiling

./bin/neo-go contract compile -i contract.go

By default the filename will be the name of your .go file with the .nef extension, the file will be located in the same directory where your Go contract is. If you want another location for your compiled contract:

./bin/neo-go contract compile -i contract.go --out /Users/foo/bar/contract.nef

If you contract is split across multiple files, you must provide a path to the directory where package files are contained instead of a single Go file (out.nef will be used as the default output file in this case):

./bin/neo-go contract compile -i ./path/to/contract

Debugging

You can dump the opcodes generated by the compiler with the following command:

./bin/neo-go contract inspect -i contract.go -c

This will result in something like this:

INDEX    OPCODE      PARAMETER            
0        INITSLOT    0500 ("\x05\x00")    <<
3        PUSH0                            
4        REVERSEN                         
5        SYSCALL     "\x9a\x1f\x19J"      
10       NOP                              
11       STLOC0                           
12       LDLOC0                           
13       PUSH1                            
14       REVERSEN                         
15       PUSH1                            
16       PACK                             
17       SYSCALL     "\x05\a\x92\x16"     
22       NOP                              
23       PUSH0                            
24       REVERSEN                         
25       SYSCALL     "E\x99Z\\"           
30       NOP                              
31       STLOC1                           
32       LDLOC1                           
33       PUSH1                            
34       REVERSEN                         
35       PUSH1                            
36       PACK                             
37       SYSCALL     "\x05\a\x92\x16"     
42       NOP                              
43       PUSH0                            
44       REVERSEN                         
45       SYSCALL     "\x87\xc3\xd2d"      
50       NOP                              
51       STLOC2                           
52       LDLOC2                           
53       PUSH1                            
54       REVERSEN                         
55       PUSH1                            
56       PACK                             
57       SYSCALL     "\x05\a\x92\x16"     
62       NOP                              
63       PUSH0                            
64       REVERSEN                         
65       SYSCALL     "\x1dY\xe1\x19"      
70       NOP                              
71       STLOC3                           
72       LDLOC3                           
73       PUSH1                            
74       REVERSEN                         
75       PUSH1                            
76       PACK                             
77       SYSCALL     "\x05\a\x92\x16"     
82       NOP                              
83       PUSH1                            
84       RET

Neo Smart Contract Debugger support

It's possible to debug contracts written in Go using standard Neo Smart Contract Debugger which is a part of Neo Blockchain Toolkit. To do that you need to generate debug information using --debug option, like this:

$ ./bin/neo-go contract compile -i contract.go -c contract.yml -m contract.manifest.json -o contract.nef --debug contract.debug.json

This file can then be used by debugger and set up to work just like for any other supported language.

Deploying

Deploying a contract to blockchain with neo-go requires both NEF and JSON manifest generated by the compiler from configuration file provided in YAML format. To create contract manifest pass YAML file with -c parameter and specify manifest output file with -m:

./bin/neo-go contract compile -i contract.go -c config.yml -m contract.manifest.json

Example YAML file contents:

name: Contract
safemethods: []
supportedstandards: []
events:
  - name: info
    parameters:
      - name: message
        type: ByteString

Then the manifest can be passed to the deploy command via -m option:

$ ./bin/neo-go contract deploy -i contract.nef -m contract.manifest.json -r http://localhost:20331 -w wallet.json

Deployment works via an RPC server, an address of which is passed via -r option and should be signed using a wallet from -w option. More details can be found in deploy command help.

Neo Express support

It's possible to deploy contracts written in Go using Neo Express which is a part of Neo Blockchain Toolkit. To do that you need to generate a different metadata file using YAML written for deployment with neo-go. It's done in the same step with compilation via --config input parameter and --abi output parameter, combined with debug support the command line will look like this:

$ ./bin/neo-go contract compile -i contract.go --config contract.yml -o contract.nef --debug contract.debug.json --abi contract.abi.json

This file can then be used by toolkit to deploy contract the same way contracts in other languagues are deployed.

Invoking

You can import your contract into the standalone VM and run it there (see VM documentation for more info), but that only works for simple contracts that don't use blockchain a lot. For more real contracts you need to deploy them first and then do test invocations and regular invocations with contract testinvokefunction and contract invokefunction commands (or their variants, see contract command help for more details. They all work via RPC, so it's a mandatory parameter.

Example call (contract f84d6a337fbc3d3a201d41da99e86b479e7a2554 with method balanceOf and method's parameter AK2nJJpJr6o664CWJKi1QRXjqeic2zRp8y using given RPC server and wallet and paying 0.00001 GAS for this transaction):

$ ./bin/neo-go contract invokefunction -r http://localhost:20331 -w my_wallet.json -g 0.00001 f84d6a337fbc3d3a201d41da99e86b479e7a2554 balanceOf AK2nJJpJr6o664CWJKi1QRXjqeic2zRp8y

Smart contract examples

Some examples are provided in the examples directory. For more sophisticated real-world contracts written in Go check out NeoFS contracts.

How to report compiler bugs

  1. Make a proper testcase (example testcases can be found in the tests folder)
  2. Create an issue on Github
  3. Make a PR with a reference to the created issue, containing the testcase that proves the bug
  4. Either you fix the bug yourself or wait for patch that solves the problem