PASO: A Web-Based Parser for Solidity Language Analysis

Abstract

Smart Contracts are computer programs which implement and execute transactions and manage business logic on a decentralized public ledger. Smart Contracts can be written in different programming languages and for different Blockchains. Currently the most used language for Smart Contracts is Solidity and the most used platform is the Ethereum Blockchain. Assessing the quality of Smart Contract programs is an important task required to professional programmers, especially when a programming language has so powerful economic implications. It is therefore crucial to provide professional programmers with tools for the evaluation of Smart Contracts. In software engineering, software metrics has been defined and used to measure software quality and, more in general, to qualify software under the principle “You Can't Manage What You Don't Measure”. For the Solidity programming language there are only a few Standalone Applications to analyse the Smart Contract metrics. The aim of this paper is first to build a tool for the practical computation of a specific set of Solidity source code metrics, so that the set will be extensible in the future according also to Solidity compiler evolution, second to fully enable a web-based usage of the tool to access the metrics of the Solidity programming language. The tool, PASO, differently from the existing application, is able to give software metrics values for Smart Contracts written in Solidity programming language just using a web browser.