---
# System prepended metadata

title: Untitled

---

Sol layout


Layout of State Variables in Storage
State variables of contracts are stored in storage in a compact way such that multiple values sometimes use the same storage slot. Except for dynamically-sized arrays and mappings (see below), data is stored contiguously item after item starting with the first state variable, which is stored in slot 0. For each variable, a size in bytes is determined according to its type. Multiple, contiguous items that need less than 32 bytes are packed into a single storage slot if possible, according to the following rules:

The first item in a storage slot is stored lower-order aligned.

Value types use only as many bytes as are necessary to store them.

If a value type does not fit the remaining part of a storage slot, it is stored in the next storage slot.

Structs and array data always start a new slot and their items are packed tightly according to these rules.

Items following struct or array data always start a new storage slot.

For contracts that use inheritance, the ordering of state variables is determined by the C3-linearized order of contracts starting with the most base-ward contract. If allowed by the above rules, state variables from different contracts do share the same storage slot.

The elements of structs and arrays are stored after each other, just as if they were given as individual values.




Mappings and Dynamic Arrays
Due to their unpredictable size, mappings and dynamically-sized array types cannot be stored “in between” the state variables preceding and following them. Instead, they are considered to occupy only 32 bytes with regards to the rules above and the elements they contain are stored starting at a different storage slot that is computed using a Keccak-256 hash.

Assume the storage location of the mapping or array ends up being a slot p after applying the storage layout rules. For dynamic arrays, this slot stores the number of elements in the array (byte arrays and strings are an exception, see below). For mappings, the slot stays empty, but it is still needed to ensure that even if there are two mappings next to each other, their content ends up at different storage locations.

Array data is located starting at keccak256(p) and it is laid out in the same way as statically-sized array data would: One element after the other, potentially sharing storage slots if the elements are not longer than 16 bytes.


some context below


// Number of elements in dynamic array (codex) is stored at index 1 i.e. web3.eth.getStorageAt(instance, 1)
// Actual elements stored in dynamic array (codex) can be found at index uint256(keccak256(1)); //
80084422859880547211683076133703299733277748156566366325829078699459944778998
// New elements added to dynamic array (codex) can be found at index uint256(keccak256(1)) + index in array e.g.
// First element is found at uint256(keccak256(1)) + 0;
// Second element is found at uint256(keccak256(1)) + 1;
// Third element is found at uint256(keccak256(1)) + 2;



The value corresponding to a mapping key k is located at keccak256(h(k) . p) where . is concatenation and h is a function that is applied to the key depending on its type:

for value types, h pads the value to 32 bytes in the same way as when storing the value in memory.

for strings and byte arrays, h(k) is just the unpadded data.



bytes and string
bytes and string are encoded identically. In general, the encoding is similar to bytes1[], in the sense that there is a slot for the array itself and a data area that is computed using a keccak256 hash of that slot’s position. However, for short values (shorter than 32 bytes) the array elements are stored together with the length in the same slot.

In particular: if the data is at most 31 bytes long, the elements are stored in the higher-order bytes (left aligned) and the lowest-order byte stores the value length * 2. For byte arrays that store data which is 32 or more bytes long, the main slot p stores length * 2 + 1 and the data is stored as usual in keccak256(p). This means that you can distinguish a short array f rom a long array by checking if the lowest bit is set: short (not set) and long (set).



Layout in Memory
Solidity reserves four 32-byte slots, with specific byte ranges (inclusive of endpoints) being used as follows:

0x00 - 0x3f (64 bytes): scratch space for hashing methods

0x40 - 0x5f (32 bytes): currently allocated memory size (aka. free memory pointer)

0x60 - 0x7f (32 bytes): zero slot

Scratch space can be used between statements (i.e. within inline assembly). The zero slot is used as initial value for dynamic memory arrays and should never be written to (the free memory pointer points to 0x80 initially).

Solidity always places new objects at the free memory pointer and memory is never freed (this might change in the future).

Elements in memory arrays in Solidity always occupy multiples of 32 bytes (this is even true for bytes1[], but not for bytes and string). Multi-dimensional memory arrays are pointers to memory arrays. The length of a dynamic array is stored at the first slot of the array and followed by the array elements.



Layout of Call Data
The input data for a function call is assumed to be in the format defined by the ABI specification. Among others, the ABI specification requires arguments to be padded to multiples of 32 bytes. The internal function calls use a different convention.

Arguments for the constructor of a contract are directly appended at the end of the contract’s code, also in ABI encoding. The constructor will access them through a hard-coded offset, and not by using the codesize opcode, since this of course changes when appending data to the code.



Cleaning Up Variables
When a value is shorter than 256 bit, in some cases the remaining bits must be cleaned. The Solidity compiler is designed to clean such remaining bits before any operations that might be adversely affected by the potential garbage in the remaining bits. For example, before writing a value to memory, the remaining bits need to be cleared because the memory contents can be used for computing hashes or sent as the data of a message call. Similarly, before storing a value in the storage, the remaining bits need to be cleaned because otherwise the garbled value can be observed.

Note that access via inline assembly is not considered such an operation: If you use inline assembly to access Solidity variables shorter than 256 bits, the compiler does not guarantee that the value is properly cleaned up.


Recall that an address is the last 20 bytes of the keccak-256 hash of the address’s public key