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How it Works

pallet-contracts​

Substrate's Framework for Runtime Aggregation of Modularised Entities (FRAME) contains a module which implements an API for typical functions smart contracts need (storage, querying information about accounts, …). This module is called the contracts pallet, you can find its repository here.

The contracts pallet requires smart contracts to be uploaded to the blockchain as a Wasm blob.

Ask! design​

Ask! is implemented in a similar way to ink!.

ink! designed an eDSL to implement smart contracts using Rust macros, and Ask! provides eDSL by writing a transform plugin (i.e. compiler plugin) for asc (compiler for AssemblyScript).

How it Works

In terms of implementation, Ask! extends AssemblyScript's AST (abstract syntax tree) with decorators, which adds more AST nodes to the decorated code declaration (without modifying the contract logic) to implement some contract-related interface, and finally generates an entry function that conforms to the pallet-contracts specification.

Ask! will try to make the final implementation as compatible as possible with ink! contracts, so that Ask! can reuse some of the current third-party WASM contract ecosystem.

The Ask! syntax and API design will be as close to ink! as possible, which will also help to lower the learning threshold for developers.

For example, ink! uses #[ink(constructor)]/#[ink(message)] to decorate the methods of a smart contract to describe the external call interface of the contract. And Ask! uses decorators like @constructor/@message to decorate methods defined by smart contract classes to achieve similar functionality.