PatrickAlphaC / sc-language-comparison

Language Gas Comparisons

The purpose of this repo is to compare the following languages for performance (gas optimization):

• Solidity
• Solidity & in-line Yul
• Vyper
• Huff

We also have some raw yul examples, but it's not the focus of this repo.

Initial Results

Language	Contract	Gas Cost Creation	Gas Cost Store & Read Number
Huff ♘	SimpleStorage	63444	27980
Yul 🔡	SimpleStorage	66578	No - Data
Vyper 🐍	SimpleStorage	75722	28057
Sol 🐉	SimpleStorage	90551	28152
Sol & Yul 🐉🔡	SimpleStorage	93987	28204

Table Of Contents

• Language Gas Comparisons
• Initial Results
• Table Of Contents
• Working with this repo
  • Requirements
  • Getting Started
• Contract Creation Gas Costs
  • Requirements
  • Getting contract creation gas

Working with this repo

Requirements

• Git
  • You'll know you've done it right if you can run git --version
• Foundry / Foundryup
  • This will install forge, cast, and anvil
  • You can test you've installed them right by running forge --version and get an output like: forge 0.2.0 (f016135 2022-07-04T00:15:02.930499Z)
  • To get the latest of each, just run foundryup
• Huff Compiler
  • You'll know you've done it right if you can run huffc --version and get an output like: huffc 0.2.0
• Vyper Compiler
  • You'll know you've done it right if you can run vyper --version and get an output like: 0.3.4+commit.f31f0ec
• Solidity Compiler
  • You'll know you've done it right if you can run solc --verison and get an output like:
  • solc, the solidity compiler commandline interface Version: 0.8.15+commit.e14f2714.Darwin.appleclan

Getting Started

1. Clone the repo & install dependencies

git clone https://github.com/PatrickAlphaC/sc-language-comparison
cd sc-language-comparison
make

2. Run tests

forge snapshot

You'll see the gas outputs in .gas-snapshot. This is a good outlook on gas costs on function calls, but not on contract creation.

Contract Creation Gas Costs

To test how much gas it costs to deploy a contract, we need to compile the contracts, get their bytecode, and deploy it in a raw transaction.

Requirements

• Python
  • You'll know you've done it right if you can run python --verison or python3 --version and get an output like:
  • Python 3.9.5
• web3py

Setup a new venv:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/active

Then install

pip install -r requirements.txt

Rememebr to deactivate after done:

deactivate

Getting contract creation gas

1. Compile contracts

To get the raw bytecode of each contract:

vyper src/vyper/VSimpleStorage.vy > bytecodes/vy/VSimpleStorage
huffc src/huff/HSimpleStorage.huff -b > bytecodes/huff/HSimpleStorage
solc --strict-assembly --optimize --optimize-runs 20000 yul/YYSimpleStorage.yul --bin | grep 60 > bytecodes/yul/YYSimpleStorage 
solc --optimize --optimize-runs 20000 src/yulsol/YSimpleStorage.sol --bin | grep 60 > bytecodes/yul/YSimpleStorage 
solc --optimize --optimize-runs 20000 src/solidity/SSimpleStorage.sol --bin | grep 60 > bytecodes/sol/SSimpleStorage 

Note: When we compile solidity, it adds a bunch of metadata that we don't need to the end of the binary, even when you add a --metadata-hash none flag! There is currently an issue to add this feature. We added a SSimpleStorageNoMetadata file to the bytecodes folder, and saved about 812 gas doing so. Verification on this contract though fails.

2. Start local node

make anvil

3. Run script

python compare_contract_creation.py

And you'll get an output like so:

63240 gas for Language.HUFF
76142 gas for Language.VY
90539 gas for Language.SOL
93987 gas for Language.YUL
65054 gas for Language.YYL

If you'd like to store a number on a contract, you can run something like:

cast send 0x8A791620dd6260079BF849Dc5567aDC3F2FdC318 "storeNumber(uint256)" 77 --private-key 0xac0974bec39a17e36ba4a6b4d238ff944bacb478cbed5efcae784d7bf4f2ff80

cast send CONTRACT_ADDRESS FUNCTION_SIGNATURE ARGS --private-key YOUR_KEY

Private Key 0xac0974bec39a17e36ba4a6b4d238ff944bacb478cbed5efcae784d7bf4f2ff80 is the private key of account 0 for the anvil chain.

And then read the number:

cast call 0x8A791620dd6260079BF849Dc5567aDC3F2FdC318 "readNumber()" 

cast call CONTRACT_ADDRESS FUNCTION_SIGNATURE ARGS