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PyMich Improves Tezos Bridge To The World’s Second Most Popular Programming Language Python

The Tezos Developer Ecosystem

As reported earlier this year, Tezos is one of the biggest and most active L1 developers ecosystems and number 4 in the top 10 smart contract platforms with the most active developers.

With Michelson as base-layer language, Tezos offers other programming languages such as Ligo, SmartPy, Morley, Fi, and Archetype. Several programming tools such as Truffle Suite, Magic SDK, and Ganache-CLI have expanded support to Tezos as the first non-Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chain.

But there is always room for improvement. And that might go by the name of PyMich. PyMich is a Python bytecode compiler backend that compiles Python to Michelson.

PyMich leverages the battle-tested Python AST module in order to parse Python code. In other words, PyMich enables developers that are used to work with Python, to deploy smart contracts on Tezos.

Python

Python is the second most used programming language in the world according to the TIOBE Index of this month. It outranks Java and only programming language “C” is currently more popular amongst developers.

Python might even climb to first place in the next few months, which would be a historical event, since in the past 20 years only Java and “C” have ranked number one in the TIOBEX programming language index.

PyMich

PyMich is currently a proof of concept, but will be fully functional on Granada, the next protocol upgrade for Tezos. Granada is expected to go live within three months.

The project is implementing a Python to Michelson transpiler running on standard dev tools in order to simplify the onboarding of new developers into the Tezos smart contract ecosystem.

The goal is thus to allow writing Tezos contracts in Python such that the contract behaves isomorphically between the CPython interpreter and the Tezos virtual machine.

“With such a pythonic tool like PyMich, we are going to democratize tezos development to one of the top 3 dev communities in the world, imagine what can happen.” Bilal El Alamy

PyMich Vs SmartPy

Here are just some of the differences between PyMich and SmartPy: