Add py-revm as an alternative to pyevm

[bout3fiddy]

The default evm backend for titanoboa is: pyevm

This issue is a wishlist to introduce pyrevm as an alternative backend to pyevm.

The objective is to add pyrevm as an alternative backend. This would mean that the user would have access to pyevm as well.

My concern is: pyevm is quite simple: it's just a pip install py-evm and you're good to go. With revm, one would need to install revm and then py-revm and that might just be an additional layer of friction. Is this an over-concern?

[charles-cooper]

@bout3fiddy i think the UX issue is an over-concern. i think the concept of installing an alternative backend to get some particular feature (or performance boost, as is the case here) is pretty understandable

[DanielSchiavini]

I don't know how much work is involved in extracting the interface with the backend to some interface that can be injected. It sounds like a good idea to make this configurable by environment, considering other backends might evolve in the future.

[charles-cooper]

@DanielSchiavini mostly, i have been inheriting from Environment and overriding deploy_code and execute_code. this is kind of the high level API that i expect most backends can conform to. there are a few things which we rely on monkey-patching py-evm for though, which might take some finagling to get pyrevm to do the same.

[DanielSchiavini]

If that part of the work would need to be done anyway to get pyrevm working.. is there a reason to drop pyevm?

[charles-cooper]

i'm not sure we want to drop py-evm since it's still very monkey-patchable. i think it's useful to have the backend be pluggable. for instance, if pyrevm doesn't have the same functionality as py-evm, we might want to have "enable pyrevm but at the cost of features" type functionality.

[bout3fiddy]

I'm sort of imagining the UX to be a bit like:

from boa import set_env
from boa.evm import pyrevm, pyevm  # here we're refactoring different backends into an 'evm' folder
# from boa.evm import halmos  # maybe this is possible one day too?

# set pyevm backend:
# boa.set_env(pyevm.Env())  # this is default so user doesn't necessarily need to set it explicitly

# set pyrevm backend:
boa.set_env(pyrevm.Env())  # this must be explicitly set to enable revm

...

contract = boa.loads("..../SomeContract.vy") 
boa.env.set_balance(contract, 100)  # add 100 ETH to contract

The api for set_balance is similar already: https://github.com/gakonst/pyrevm/blob/6554e943c9e2d8aa23ea2cabfeda7fcaa348d8ed/pytest/test.py#L63

How does this look/feel ?

[charles-cooper]

https://twitter.com/rakitadragan/status/1745632344873030049 -- revm seems patchable now(!)

[DanielSchiavini]

@bout3fiddy is a basic implementation useful for you guys? That should be easy - pyrevm works well with the Vyper pipelines. But that misses some features compared with boa+pyevm.