Skip to content

CHANGELOG.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
726 lines (542 loc) · 37.8 KB

CHANGELOG.md

File metadata and controls

726 lines (542 loc) · 37.8 KB

Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog (modification: no type change headlines) and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

4.1.0 - 2019-09-12

This is the first feature-complete Istanbul release, containing implementations for all 6 EIPs, see the HF meta EIP EIP-1679 for an overview. Beside this release contains further unrelated features as well as bug fixes.

Note that Istanbul support is still labeled as beta. All implementations have only basic test coverage since the official Ethereum consensus tests are not yet merged. There might be also last minute changes to EIPs during the testing period.

Istanbul Summary

See the VM Istanbul hardfork meta issue #501 for a summary on all the changes.

Added EIPs:

Other Features

  • Two new event types beforeMessage and afterMessage, emitting a Message before and an EVMResult after running a Message, see also the updated section in the README on this, PR #577

Bug Fixes

  • Transaction error strings should not contain multiple consecutive whitespace characters, this has been fixed, PR #578
  • Fixed vm.stateManager.generateCanonicalGenesis() to produce a correct genesis block state root (in particular for the Goerli testnet), PR #589

Refactoring / Docs

  • Preparation for separate lists of opcodes for the different HFs, PR #582, see also follow-up PR #592 making this list a property of the VM instance
  • Clarification in the docs for the behavior of the activatePrecompiles VM option, PR #595

4.0.0 - 2019-08-06

First TypeScript based VM release, other highlights:

  • New Call and Code Loop Structure / EVM Encapsulation
  • EEI for Environment Communication
  • Istanbul Process Start
  • Promise-based API

See v4.0.0-beta.1 release for full release notes.

Changes since last beta

  • Simplification of execution results, PR #551
  • Fix error propagation in Cache.flush() method from StateManager, PR #562
  • StateManager storage key length validation (now throws on addresses not having a 32-byte length), PR #565

4.0.0-beta.1 - 2019-06-19

Since changes in this release are pretty deep reaching and broadly distributed, we will first drop out one or several beta releases until we are confident on both external API as well as inner structural changes. See v4 branch for some major entry point into the work on the release.

It is highly recommended that you do some testing of your library against this and following beta versions and give us some feedback!

These will be the main release notes for the v4 feature updates, subsequent beta releases and the final release will just publish the delta changes and point here for reference.

Breaking changes in the release notes are preeceeded with [BREAKING], do a search for an overview.

The outstanding work of @s1na has to be mentioned here. He has done the very large portion of the coding and without him this release wouldn't have been possible. Thanks Sina! 🙂

So what's new?

TypeScript

This is the first TypeScript release of the VM (yay! 🎉).

TypeScript handles ES6 transpilation a bit differently (at the end: cleaner) than babel so require syntax of the library slightly changes to:

const VM = require('ethereumjs-vm').default

The library now also comes with type declaration files distributed along with the package published.

Relevant PRs
  • Preparation, migration of Bloom, Stack and Memory, PR #495
  • StateManager migration, PR #496
  • Migration of precompiles, opcode list, EEI, Message, TxContext to TypeScript, PR #497
  • Migration of EVM (old: Interpreter) and exceptions, PR #504
  • Migration of Interpreter (old: Loop), PR #505
  • Migration of opFns (opcode implementations), PR #506
  • Migration of the main index.js VM class, PR #507
  • Migration of VM.runCode(), PR #508
  • Migration of VM.runCall(), PR #510
  • Migration of VM.runTx(), PR #511
  • Migration of VM.runBlock(), PR #512
  • Migration of VM.runBlockchain(), PR #517
  • TypeScript finalization PR, config switch, PR #518
  • Doc generation via TypeDoc, PR #522

EVM Modularization and Structural Refactoring

New Call and Code Loop Structure / EVM Encapsulation

This release switches to a new class based and promisified structure for working down VM calls and running through code loops, and encapsulates this logic to be bound to the specific EVM (so the classical Ethereum Virtual Machine) implementation in the evm module, opening the way for a future parallel eWASM additional implementation.

This new logic is mainly handled by the two new classes EVM (old: Interpreter) and Interpreter (old: Loop), see PR #483 for the initial work on this. The old VM.runCall() and VM.runCode() methods are just kept as being wrappers and will likely be deprecated on future releases once the inner API structure further stabilizes.

This new structure should make extending the VM by subclassing and adopting functionality much easier, e.g. by changing opcode functionality or adding custom onces by using an own Interpreter.getOpHandler() implementation. You are highly encouraged to play around, see what you can do and give us feedback on possibilities and limitations.

EEI for Environment Communication

For interacting with the blockchain environment there has been introduced a dedicated EEI (Ethereum Environment Interface) module closely resembling the respective EEI spec, see PR #486 for the initial work.

This makes handling of environmental data by the VM a lot cleaner and transparent and should as well allow for much easier extension and modification.

Changes
  • Detached precompiles from the VM, PR #492
  • Subdivided runState, refactored Interpreter (old: Loop), PR #498
  • [BREAKING] Dropped emitFreeLogs flag, to replace it is suggested to implement by inheriting Interpreter (old: Loop), PR #498
  • Split EVM.executeMessage() with EVM.executeCall() and EVM.executeCreate() for call and create specific logic (old names: Interpreter.[METHOD_NAME]()), PR #499
  • Further simplification of Interpreter/EVM (old: Loop/Interpreter) structure, PR #506
  • [BREAKING] Dropped VM.runJit() in favor of direct handling in EVM (old: Interpreter), officially not part of the external API but mentioning just in case, PR #515
  • Removed StorageReader, moved logic to StateManager, #534

Istanbul Process Start

With this release we start the Istanbul hardfork integration process and have activated the istanbul hardfork option for the constructor.

This is meant to be used experimentation and reference implementations, we have made a start with integrating draft EIP-1108 Istanbul candidate support reducing the gas costs for alt_bn128 precompiles, see PR #539 for implementation details.

Note that this is still very early in the process since no EIP in a final state is actually accepted for being included into Istanbul on the time of release. The v4 release series will be kept as an experimental series during the process with breaking changes introduced along the way without too much notice, so be careful and tighten the VM dependency if you want to give your users the chance for some early experimentation with some specific implementation state.

Once scope of Istanbul as well as associated EIPs are finalized a stable Istanbul VM version will be released as a subsequent major release.

Code Modernization and Version Updates

The main API with the v4 release switches from being callback based to using promises, see PR #546.

Here is an example for changed API call runTx.

Old callback-style invocation:

vm.runTx(
  {
    tx: tx,
  },
  function(err, result) {
    if (err) {
      // Handle errors appropriately
    }
    // Do something with the result
  },
)

Promisified usage:

try {
  let result = await vm.runTx({ tx: tx })
  // Do something with the result
} catch (err) {
  // handle errors appropriately
}
Code Modernization Changes
  • Promisified internal usage of async opcode handlers, PR #491
  • Promisified runTx internals, PR #493
  • Promisified runBlock internals, restructure, reduced shared global state, PR #494
Version Updates
  • Updated ethereumjs-account from 2.x to 3.x, part of PR #496
Features
  • The VM now also supports a Common class instance for chain and HF setting, PRs #525 and #526
Bug Fixes
  • Fixed error message in runTx(), PR #523
  • Changed default hardfork in StateManager to petersburg, PR #524
  • Replaced Object.assign() calls and fixed type errors, PR #529

Development

  • Significant blockchain test speed improvements, PR #536

3.0.0 - 2019-03-29

This release comes with a modernized ES6-class structured code base, some significant local refactoring work regarding how Stack and Memory are organized within the VM and it finalizes a first round of module structuring now having separate folders for bloom, evm and state related code. The release also removes some rarely used parts of the API (hookedVM, VM.deps).

All this is to a large extend preparatory work for a v4.0.0 release which will follow in the next months with TypeScript support and more system-wide refactoring work leading to a more modular and expandable VM and providing the ground for future eWASM integration. If you are interested in the release process and want to take part in the refactoring discussion see the associated issue #455.

VM Refactoring/Breaking Changes

  • New Memory class for evm memory manipulation, PR #442
  • Refactored Stack manipulation in evm, PR #460
  • Dropped createHookedVm (BREAKING), being made obsolete by the new StateManager API, PR #451
  • Dropped VM.deps attribute (please require dependencies yourself if you used this), PR #478
  • Removed fakeBlockchain class and associated tests, PR #466
  • The petersburg hardfork rules are now run as default (before: byzantium), PR #485

Modularization

  • Renamed vm module to evm, move precompiles to evm module, PR #481
  • Moved stateManager, storageReader and cache to state module, #443
  • Replaced static VM logTable with dynamic inline version in EXP opcode, #450

Code Modernization/ES6

  • Converted VM to ES6 class, PR #478
  • Migrated stateManager and storageReader to ES6 class syntax, PR #452

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a bug where stateManager.setStateRoot() didn't clear the _storageTries cache, PR #445
  • Fixed longer output than return length in CALL opcode, PR #454
  • Use BN.toArrayLike() instead of BN.toBuffer() (browser compatibility), PR #458
  • Fixed tx value overflow 256 bits, PR #471

Maintenance/Optimization

  • Use BN reduction context in MODEXP precompile, PR #463

Documentation

  • Fixed API doc types for Bloom filter methods, PR #439

Testing

  • New Karma browser testing for the API tests, PRs #461, #468
  • Removed unused parts and tests within the test setup, PR #437
  • Fixed a bug using --json trace flag in the tests, PR #438
  • Complete switch to Petersburg on tests, fix coverage, PR #448
  • Added test for StateManager.dumpStorage(), PR #462
  • Fixed ecmul_0-3_5616_28000_96 (by test setup adoption), PR #473

2.6.0 - 2019-02-07

Petersburg Support

Support for the Petersburg (aka constantinopleFix) hardfork by integrating Petersburg ready versions of associated libraries, see also PR #433:

  • ethereumjs-common (chain and HF logic and helper functionality) v1.1.0
  • ethereumjs-blockchain v3.4.0
  • ethereumjs-block v2.2.0

To instantiate the VM with Petersburg HF rules set the opts.hardfork constructor parameter to petersburg. This will run the VM on the new Petersburg rules having removed the support for EIP 1283.

Goerli Readiness

The VM is now also ready to execute on blocks from the final version of the Goerli cross-client testnet and can therefore be instantiated with opts.chain set to goerli.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed mixed sync/async functions in cache, PR #422
  • Fixed a bug in setStateroot and caching by clearing the stateManager cache after setting the state root such that stale values are not returned, PR #420
  • Fixed cache access on the hooked VM (deprecated), PR #434

Refactoring

Following changes might be relevant for you if you are hotfixing/monkey-patching on parts of the VM:

  • Moved bloom to its own directory, PR #429
  • Moved opcodes, opFns and logTable to lib/vm, PR #425
  • Converted Bloom to ES6 class, PR #428
  • Converted Cache to ES6 class, added unit tests, PR 427

2.5.1 - 2019-01-19

Features

  • Added memoryWordCount to the step event object, PR #405

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a bug which caused an overwrite of the passed state trie (opts.state) when instantiating the library with the opts.activatePrecompiles option, PR #415
  • Fixed error handling in runCode (in case loadContract fails), PR #408
  • Fixed a bug in the StateManager.generateGenesis() function, PR #400

Tests

  • Upgraded ethereumjs-blockchain and level for test runs, PR #414
  • Fixed issue when running code coverage on PRs from forks, PR #402

2.5.0 - 2018-11-21

This is the first release of the VM with full support for all Constantinople EIPs. It further comes along with huge improvements on consensus conformity and introduces the Beta version of a new StateManager API.

Constantinople Support

For running the VM with Constantinople hardfork rules, set the option in the VM constructor opts.hardfork to constantinople. Supported hardforks are byzantium and constantinople, default setting will stay on byzantium for now but this will change in a future release.

Changes related to Constantinople:

Consensus Conformity

This release is making a huge leap forward regarding consensus conformity, and even if you are not interested in Constantinople support at all, you should upgrade just for this reason. Some context: we couldn't run blockchain tests for a long time on a steady basis due to performance constraints and when we re-triggered a test run after quite some time with PR #341 the result was a bit depressing with over 300 failing tests. Thanks to joined efforts from the community and core team members we could bring this down far quicker than expected and this is the first release for a long time which practically comes with complete consensus conformity - with just three recently added tests failing (see skipBroken list in tests/tester.js) and otherwise passing all blockchain tests and all state tests for both Constantinople and Byzantium rules. 🏆 🏆 🏆

Consensus Conformity related changes:

  • Reset selfdestruct on REVERT, see PR #392
  • Undo Bloom filter changes from PR #295, see PR #384
  • Fixes broken BLOCKHASH opcode, see PR #381
  • Fix failing blockchain test GasLimitHigherThan2p63m1, see PR #380
  • Stop adding account to cache when checking if it is empty, see PR #375

State Manager Interface

The StateManager (lib/stateManager.js) - providing a high-level interface to account and contract data from the underlying state trie structure - has been completely reworked and there is now a close-to-being finalized API (currently marked as Beta) coming with its own documentation.

This comes along with larger refactoring work throughout more-or-less the whole code base and the StateManager now completely encapsulates the trie structure and the cache backend used, see issue #268 and associated PRs for reference. This will make it much easier in the future to bring along an own state manager serving special needs (optimized for memory and performance, run on mobile,...) by e.g. using a different trie implementation, cache or underlying storage or database backend.

We plan to completely separate the currently still integrated state manager into its own repository in one of the next releases, this will then be a breaking v3.0.0 release. Discussion around a finalized interface (we might e.g. drop all genesis-releated methods respectively methods implemented in the DefaultStateManager) is still ongoing and you are very much invited to jump in and articulate your needs, just take e.g. the issue mentioned above as an entry point.

Change related to the new StateManager interface:

  • StateManager interface simplification, see PR #388
  • Make StateManager cache and trie private, see PR #385
  • Remove vm accesses to StateManager trie and cache, see PR #376
  • Remove explicit direct cache interactions, see PR #366
  • Remove contract specific commit, see PR #335
  • Fixed incorrect references to trie in tests, see PR #345
  • Added StateManager API documentation, see PR #393

New Features

  • New emitFreeLogs option, allowing any contract to emit an unlimited quantity of events without modifying the block gas limit (default: false) which can be used in debugging contexts, see PRs #378, #379

Testing and Documentation

Beyond the reintegrated blockchain tests there is now a separate test suite to test the API of the library, see tests/api. This should largely reduce the risk of introducing new bugs on the API level on future changes, generally ease the development process by being able to develop against the specific tests and also allows using the tests as a reference for examples on how to use the API.

On the documentation side the API documentation has also been consolidated and there is now a unified and auto-generated API documentation (previously being manually edited (and too often forgotten) in README).

  • Added API tests for index.js, StateManager, see PR #364
  • Added API Tests for runJit and fakeBlockchain, see PR #331
  • Added API tests for runBlockchain, see PR #336
  • Added runBlock API tests, see PR #360
  • Added runTx API tests, see PR #352
  • Added API Tests for the Bloom module, see PR #330
  • New consistent auto-generated API documentation, see PR #377
  • Blockchain tests now run by default on CI, see PR #374
  • Switched from istanbul to nyc, see PR #334
  • Usage of sealEngine in blockchain tests, see PR #373
  • New tap-spec option to get a formatted test run result summary, see README, see PR #363
  • Updates/fixes on the JSDoc comments, see PRs #362, #361

Bug Fixes and Maintenance

Some bug fix and maintenance updates:

  • Fix error handling in fakeBlockChain, see PR #320
  • Update of ethereumjs-util to v6.0.0, see PR #369

Thank You

Special thanks to:

  • @mattdean-digicatapult for his indefatigable work on the new StateManager interface and for fixing a large portion of the failing blockchain tests
  • @rmeissner for the work on Constantinople
  • @vpulim for jumping in so quickly and doing a reliable SSTORE implementation within 4 days
  • @s1na for the new API test suite

Beyond this release contains contributions from the following people: @jwasinger, @Agusx1211, @HolgerD77, @danjm, @whymarrh, @seesemichaelj, @kn

Thank you all very much, and thanks @axic for keeping an ongoing eye on overall library quality!

2.4.0 - 2018-07-27

With the 2.4.x release series we now start to gradually add Constantinople features with the bitwise shifting instructions from EIP 145 making the start being introduced in the v2.4.0 release.

Since both the scope of the Constantinople hardfork as well as the state of at least some of the EIPs to be included are not yet finalized, this is only meant for EXPERIMENTAL purposes, e.g. for developer tools to give users early access and make themself familiar with dedicated features.

Once scope and EIPs from Constantinople are final we will target a v2.5.0 release which will officially introduce Constantinople support with all the changes bundled together.

Note that from this release on we also introduce new chain (default: mainnet) and hardfork (default: byzantium) initialization parameters, which make use of our new ethereumjs-common library and in the future will allow for parallel hardfork support from Byzantium onwards.

Since hardfork default might be changed or dropped in future releases, you might want to explicitly set this to byzantium on your next update to avoid future unexpected behavior.

All the changes from this release:

FEATURES/FUNCTIONALITY

  • Improved chain and fork support, see PR #304
  • Support for the Constantinople bitwise shifiting instructions SHL, SHR and SAR, see PR #251
  • New newContract event which can be used to do interrupting tasks on contract/address creation, see PR #306
  • Alignment of behavior of bloom filter hashing to go along with mainnet compatible clients BREAKING, see PR #295

UPDATES/TESTING

  • Usage of the latest rustbn.js API, see PR #312
  • Some cleanup in precompile error handling, see PR #318
  • Some cleanup for StateManager, see PR #266
  • Renaming of util.sha3 usages to util.keccak256 and bump ethereumjs-util to v5.2.0 (you should do to if you use ethereumjs-util)
  • Parallel testing of theByzantium and Constantinople state tests, see PR #317
  • For lower build times our CI configuration now runs solely on CircleCI and support for Travis have been dropped, see PR #316

BUG FIXES

  • Programmatic runtime errors in the VM execution context (within an opcode) are no longer absorbed and displayed as a VMError but explicitly thrown, allowing for easier discovery of implementation bugs, see PR #307
  • Fix of the Bloom.check() method not working properly, see PR #311
  • Fix a bug when REVERT is used within a CREATE context, see PR #297
  • Fix a bug in FakeBlockChain error handing, see PR #320

2.3.5 - 2018-04-25

  • Fixed BYTE opcode return value bug, PR #293
  • Clean up touched-accounts management in StateManager, PR #287
  • New stateManager.copy() function, PR #276
  • Updated Circle CI configuration to 2.0 format, PR #292

2.3.4 - 2018-04-06

  • Support of external statemanager in VM constructor (experimental), PR #264
  • ES5 distribution on npm for better toolchain compatibility, PR #281
  • allowUnlimitedContractSize VM option for debugging purposes, PR #282
  • Added gasRefund to transaction results, PR #284
  • Test coverage / coveralls support for the library, PR #270
  • Properly calculate totalgas for large return values, PR #275
  • Improve iterateVm check output after step hook, PR #279

2.3.3 - 2018-02-02

  • Reworked memory expansion/access for opcodes, PR #174 (fixes consensus bugs on large numbers >= 53 bit for opcodes using memory location)
  • Keep stack items as bn.js instances (arithmetic performance increases), PRs #159, #254 and #256
  • More consistent VM error handling, PR #219
  • Validate stack items after operations, PR #222
  • Updated ethereumjs-util dependency from 4.5.0 to 5.1.x, PR #241
  • Fixed child contract deletion bug, PR #246
  • Fixed a bug associated with direct stack usage, PR #240
  • Fix error on large return fees, PR #235
  • Various bug fixes

2.3.2 - 2017-10-29

  • Better handling of rustbn.js exceptions
  • Fake (default if non-provided) blockchain fixes
  • Testing improvements (separate skip lists)
  • Minor optimizations and bug fixes

2.3.1 - 2017-10-11

  • Byzantium compatible
  • New opcodes REVERT, RETURNDATA and STATICCALL
  • Precompiles for curve operations and bigint mod exp
  • Transaction return data in receipts
  • For detailed list of changes see PR #161
  • For a Spurious Dragon/EIP 150 compatible version of this library install latest version of 2.2.x

[2.3.0] - Version Skipped due to faulty npm release

2.2.2 - 2017-09-19

  • Fixed JS number issues and certain edge cases
  • Fixed various smaller bugs and improved code consistency
  • Some VM speedups
  • Testing improvements
  • Narrowed down dependencies for library not to break after Byzantium release

2.2.1 - 2017-08-04

  • Fixed bug prevent the library to be used in the browser

2.2.0 - 2017-07-28

  • Spurious Dragon & EIP 150 compatible
  • Detailed list of changes in pull requests #147 and #143
  • Removed enableHomestead option when creating a new VM object (pre-Homestead fork rules not supported any more)

2.1.0 - 2017-06-28

  • Homestead compatible
  • update state test runner for General State Tests

Older releases: