When Blockchain Meets Domain Specific Language: A Review

In recent years, blockchain has become popular for its characteristics, such as decentralization, data immutability, and easy traceability, and has been used in the financial industry, IoT, law, etc. However, smart contracts for blockchain are highly professional and poorly readable for users. As a result, several domain-specific languages (DSLs) based on smart contracts have been proposed to reduce the cost of communication between users and contract developers, and even enable users to write reliable smart contracts by themselves. Domain-specific languages for smart contracts are proposed to achieve the goal of being able to automatically translate to universal smart contract programming languages while retaining the readability, critical writing style and enhanced semantic clarity of natural language. Therefore, we investigate the emergence of DSLs based on smart contracts since Blockchain 2.0, analysis and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of existing DSLs. We classify these DSLs by different intermediate abstract structure, and propose to design a quantitative evaluation framework of DSL features to evaluate. Finally, we conclude the existing DSLs’ characterstics and propose future the development direction of DSL based on smart contract.