Understanding the structure and behaviour of a smart contract’s bytecode — Part 5 of the “All About Data Locations” subseries. This article focuses on the last data locations of the EVM that are accessible in Solidity: the bytecode of a smart contract. We will look at most aspects of a contract’s bytecode at the architecture level. This includes some detailed explanations…

Exploring the EVM stack machine, and how pushing and popping this in and out of the stack work. — This is Part IV of the “All About Data Locations” subseries. In today’s article, we will look at the fourth data location of the EVM: the stack. We use it all of the time in Solidity when we assign values to variables, but how does the EVM stack work under…

Understanding the “data” field of an Ethereum transaction in Solidity — This is Part III of the “All About Data Locations” sub-series. Today, we will learn the specificities of the calldata and why you should privilege it over other data locations like memory. We will use the code examples from the Gnosis safe contract to understand the three EVM opcodes related…

Understanding the short term memory of the EVM — This is Part II of the “All About Data Locations” sub-series. We will learn the layout of the EVM memory, its reserved spaces, the free memory pointer, how to use memory references to read and write from/to memory and the conventional best practices when working with memory. We will use…

Diving into storage references and smart contract storage layout. — This is Part I of the “All About Data Locations” sub-series. In today's article, we cover in more detail an important data location in the EVM: the smart contract storage. We will see how the layout of the contract storage works, storage references. how to write to the contract storage…

A deep dive into storage, memory, and calldata — This is a long, detailed, and in-depth read. But don’t be afraid. Settle in with a nice coffee or your favourite drink. It will all be fine. See the “Table of Contents” section below to jump into the section you are interested in. Today, we explore a new and essential…

Implicit vs explicit conversion in Solidity, and examples to understand conversion between types. — Today's article is quite in-depth, technical and detailed! We explore conversions between different types in Solidity. We main objective of this article is for you to understand “what is the difference between implicit conversion vs explicit conversion in Solidity”. We will then cover each possible conversion between types, still using…

Today we explore for, while and do ... while loops in Solidity, using contracts examples from The Graph. We will also see how to control their behaviour with break and continue, and see what some of the well-known smart contracts experts in the industry recommend to write optimised loops and…