OCaml Under The Hood: SmartPy

SmartPy is a complete system to develop smart-contracts for the Tezos blockchain. It is an embedded EDSL in python to write contracts and their test scenarios. It includes an online IDE, a chain explorer, and a command-line interface. Python is used to generate programs in an imperative, type-inferred, intermediate language called SmartML. SmartML is also the name of the OCaml library which provides an interpreter, a compiler to Michelson (the smart-contract language of Tezos), as well as a scenario “on-chain” interpreter. The IDE uses a mix of OCaml built with js_of_ocaml and pure Javascript. The command-line interface also builds with js_of_ocaml to run on Node.js.