Pinting

This project introduces two key components to enhance the development workflow within the Essential ecosystem:

1. A Hardhat Integration for the Pint Language: This contribution bridges the Pint Language with Hardhat, a widely-used development framework for building, testing, and deploying blockchain applications. By integrating Pint into Hardhat, developers can leverage a familiar and powerful environment while working with Pint, ensuring a seamless transition and enabling productive development without the need to learn a completely new setup.

2. A Language Server and Visual Studio Extension: To support a user-friendly and efficient development process, this project also includes a Language Server tailored for Pint, along with an extension for Visual Studio Code. Together, these tools provide essential features like code completion, syntax highlighting, etc. This ensures a smoother, more intuitive development experience, reducing friction and enabling developers to focus on building robust solutions.

This project builds on Essential’s tooling to provide a cohesive development experience for Pint smart contracts, leveraging well-established frameworks and tools to minimize friction for developers. Hardhat Integration for Pint Language

The Hardhat integration, implemented in TypeScript, extends the capabilities of the Hardhat environment to support the Pint Language. By utilizing two tools provided by Essential—essential-rest-client and pint-cli—this integration allows developers to test and develop Pint smart contracts seamlessly within the Hardhat ecosystem. From the perspective of a developer, working with Pint contracts feels no different from working with any other smart contracts, ensuring a consistent and familiar workflow. This approach reduces the learning curve and enables efficient adoption of Pint within existing development pipelines. Language Server and VSCode Extension

To enhance productivity and streamline the development process, a prototype Language Server for Pint has been implemented in Rust, on top of the tower-lsp library, and utilizing the Pint compiler (pintc) as a library. This Language Server provides critical features like syntax checking and auto-completion, making it easier for developers to write and debug Pint code.

In parallel, the Visual Studio Code extension, implemented as a Node.js application, integrates with the Language Server to deliver these features directly within the popular VSCode environment. This combination ensures that developers have access to tooling for editing Pint contracts, all while benefiting from the familiar VSCode interface. Together, the Language Server and the VSCode extension create a smooth and developer-friendly experience, further simplifying the adoption of the Pint Language in the Essential ecosystem.