The software engineer Christoph Burgdorf presented a new programming language for the Ethereum ecosystem, called Fe this October 14. It surges as a very good alternative to Solidity, the main programming language on which smart contracts are encoded and the most decentralized applications on the network.

In a post on the Ethereum Developer Blog, Burgdorf explains that even though he believes the Solidity team is doing a great job, he sees a need for developers to have more options for smart contract encoding. “A lot of people want to have a simpler alternative to Solidity,”

Fe, pronounced ‘fee’ (for ‘commission’ in English), was born as a rewrite of the Vyper compiler, the programming language that was the only alternative to Solidity. Vyper is directed to the encoding of smart contracts compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and was originally conceived by Vitalik Buterin.

Burgdorf adds that the initial idea with the Vyper rewrite was to have an alternative compiler. However, along the way, substantial differences emerged from Vyper that led to a different language, which he decided to call Faith.

The name Fe contains the letters of the chemical element iron from the periodic table. The purpose of this name is to convey a feeling of durability linked to the Rust programming language, on which the Fe compiler is written the developer clarifies.

The developer indicates that, although there is still no date for the official release of Fe, there has been significant progress in the development of the new language last month.

“We are optimistic about adding support for all the features used in an ERC-20 contract and being able to compile one before the end of 2020,” he says. This is only intended to demonstrate the capabilities of Faith.

Current work on Fe development also includes creating language specifications, which will be written as functions are implemented. “By the time we are ready for an audit, we can produce a complete specification,” says Burgdorf.

Faith as an emerging programming language for Ethereum

According to its GitHub page, Fe is defined as an emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum blockchain. With its development, the goal is to achieve the objectives set for the existing Vyper project, including a more accurate estimate of gas transactions and rates.

Additionally, “Fe emphasizes language security and is largely inspired by the Python language, as is Vyper. This provides readable and expressive code that is familiar to developers who have used Python”, says Burgdorf.

He adds that the new language is expected to use Yul, a project launched by the Solidity team as an intermediate mechanism for compatibility with versions EVM 1.0 and EVM 1.5, and with eWASM (format for smart contracts). This will avoid having to write separate backends for each of these low-level platforms, clarifies the engineer.

Burgdorf shared the Faith posts on his Twitter account. Most of the comments read after the tweet agrees with the advantages that the development of new languages ​​for Ethereum will bring.

By: Jenson Nuñez.

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