Language Guide

Algorand Python is conceptually two things:

  1. A partial implementation of the Python programming language that runs on the AVM.

  2. A framework for development of Algorand smart contracts and logic signatures, with Pythonic interfaces to underlying AVM functionality.

You can install the Algorand Python types from PyPi:

pip install algorand-python

or

poetry add algorand-python

As a partial implementation of the Python programming language, it maintains the syntax and semantics of Python. The subset of the language that is supported will grow over time, but it will never be a complete implementation due to the restricted nature of the AVM as an execution environment. As a trivial example, the async and await keywords, and all associated features, do not make sense to implement.

Being a partial implementation of Python means that existing developer tooling like IDE syntax highlighting, static type checkers, linters, and auto-formatters, will work out-of-the-box. This is as opposed to an approach to smart contract development that adds or alters language elements or semantics, which then requires custom developer tooling support, and more importantly, requires the developer to learn and understand the potentially non-obvious differences from regular Python.

The greatest advantage to maintaining semantic and syntactic compatibility, however, is only realised in combination with the framework approach. Supplying a set of interfaces representing smart contract development and AVM functionality required allows for the possibility of implementing those interfaces in pure Python! This will make it possible in the near future for you to execute tests against your smart contracts without deploying them to Algorand, and even step into and break-point debug your code from those tests.

The framework provides interfaces to the underlying AVM types and operations. By virtue of the AVM being statically typed, these interfaces are also statically typed, and require your code to be as well.

The most basic types on the AVM are uint64 and bytes[], representing unsigned 64-bit integers and byte arrays respectively. These are represented by UInt64 and Bytes in Algorand Python. There are further “bounded” types supported by the AVM which are backed by these two simple primitives. For example, bigint represents a variably sized (up to 512-bits), unsigned integer, but is actually backed by a bytes[]. This is represented by BigUInt in Algorand Python.

Unfortunately, none of these types map to standard Python primitives. In Python, an int is unsigned, and effectively unbounded. A bytes similarly is limited only by the memory available, whereas an AVM bytes[] has a maximum length of 4096. In order to both maintain semantic compatibility and allow for a framework implementation in plain Python that will fail under the same conditions as when deployed to the AVM, support for Python primitives is limited.

For more information on the philosophy and design of Algorand Python, please see “Principles”.

If you aren’t familiar with Python, a good place to start before continuing below is with the official tutorial. Just beware that as mentioned above, not all features are supported.

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