I’ve named this project echoevm.com. The main goal is to start from the simplest stack operations and gradually build a complete Ethereum bytecode execution environment.
Why choose this direction? Let’s analyze the technical modules of an Ethereum client:
Overall, I lean toward doing something engineering-focused rather than academic, yet still technically challenging. It should be meaningful both for personal technical growth and for the potential outcomes. If this minimal EVM is successfully developed, it can lead to a series of follow-up achievements, and many valuable products can be built on top of it.
The conversion from Solidity to bytecode is compiler expert territory. What I aim to do is execute the bytecode — starting with the simplest operations like addition and jump, then move on to gas calculation, context switching, and ultimately be able to execute all historical Ethereum transactions.
Implemented a very simple version. Now you can use solc to compile an Add.sol contract, and then have echoevm read the generated Add.bin deployment code, which will output the contract’s runtime code after deployment.
During the implementation of this version, I learned the difference between deployment code and runtime code. Typically, we first deploy a contract to the blockchain and then make calls to it. These are actually two different operations, but both use the same EVM execution. The EVM doesn’t care whether the input bytecode is for deployment or invocation; it simply handles different opcodes differently. Deployment code generally includes both the CODECOPY and RETURN opcodes, which can be used to distinguish the type of input.