Building a front end for Puya

This guide is for those looking to add support for a new front end language to Puya. It makes several assumptions about the reader.

• They are very familiar with building smart contracts and logic signatures on the Algorand Block Chain and are aware of the AVM and Teal op codes
• They are familiar with Puya’s existing front end languages of Algorand Python and Algorand TypeScript
• They understand lexing and parsing, and how that applies to the language they would like to target

Whilst leveraging the Puya back end takes care of a lot of the complexities in lowering a high level front end language to the stack based teal language, adding a new front end is still a significant undertaking.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Calling puya
  • Installing puya
  • Puya Options
  • AWST json
    • Source annotations
    • Other options
    • Putting it all together
• Designing a language
  • Primitive and compound types
  • Contract and logic signature paradigms
  • Other key abstractions
• Parsing
  • Generating AST
  • Visiting the AST
• AWST build
  • Define AWST nodes and WTypes
  • Visit AST and produce AWST
    • Builder Pattern
    • PyTypes and PTypes
  • Serialize to JSON