The journey begins

As Zilliqa is going live soon, I decided to brush up the build scripts and the repository structure to allow anyone to participate in the development of the language server for the Scilla programming language which is the language in which Zilliqa smart contracts are deployed.

You can find the repository and the build instructions in the Github repsitory

You can download the latest build for inclusion as a plugin here

to install it to your local Visual Studio Code you can open a terminal and run the following command with the right path to your downlad.

code --install-extension /path/to/scilla-vscode-extension-1.0.0.vsix

Afterwards you have the plugin available in your workspace and you can start editing *.scilla files which are already associated with the plugin.

Beware that you will need Java >= 1.8 installed on your system.

The generated plugin supports many features like auto completition within the file and for using functions provided by the standard libraries. Formatting and code outline as well as finding references and jump to definition is implemented.

The usage of the Xtext framework as the foundation allows to create Eclipse plugins that can be used as a building block of a integrated development environment. A complete out of the box environment based on Docker containers is planned as the next extension, with the goal of setting up new developers at workshops with the click of a button in a hosted environment.

With the release of Zilliqa to the public scaling in a trustless setting comes a big step closer and I’m excited to contribute my part.