Hello, my name is Gaston Zanitti. I've been accepted as an official member of EPF Cohort 4. Here is my week 0 update:

Interests

In the long run, my main interest is to develop a language for the EVM (or one of its L2 derivatives) or an LLVM-style IR that allows the generalisation of specific optimisations of smart contract languages. As I consider these tasks too big to be solved in 4 months, during the EPF I intend to

• Gain more experience in compiler development per se.
• Gain a deeper understanding of the specificities of EVM and gas cost management in terms of language design and optimisations.
• Better understand the current needs. Do L2s and their lower gas costs open the door to new designs/optimisations?
• Integrate my work at EPF with my ongoing learning path on compiler design and the EVM

To this end, I will try to contact some of the teams working on compilers and try to understand their needs in order to find a mutually interesting way to collaborate.

First steps

With this goal in mind, I reviewed the list of mentors and possible projects, and contacted Alex from the Ipsilon team. The Ipsilon team seems to be heavily involved in all decisions and EIPs related to the EVM.

After a short exchange, they told me about a project to work on EOF related tools for Huff and Solidity that I found interesting. They also suggested that I do a small task to familiarise myself with the codebase. In particular, they offered me to implement EIP-5656 (MCOPY) in Huff.

Conclusions

My first interactions with the Ipsilon team have been positive.

My goal for the next week is mainly focused on:

• Solve the task proposed by the Ipsilon team.
• Read all the material related to EOFv1.
• Getting in touch with some other teams working on compilers (Vyper and Fe, given my interest in Python and Rust), to further explore possible lines of collaboration.