PuyaPy - Python to TEAL compiler

PuyaPy is an optimising TEAL compiler that allows you to write code to execute on the Algorand Virtual Machine (AVM) with Python syntax.

Project background and guiding principles.

PuyaPy supports a statically-typed subset of valid Python syntax. Importantly, that subset has identical semantics when comparing Python behaviour and behaviour of the executed TEAL. For example, foo = spam() or eggs() will only execute eggs() if bool(spam()) is False.

Installation

The minimum supported Python version for running PuyaPy itself is 3.12.

You can install the developer preview of PuyaPy from PyPI into your project virtualenv:

pip install puya

If you're using poetry for dependency and virutalenv management, you can add it that way with poetry add puya.

Or if you just want to play with some examples, you can clone the repo and have a poke around.

git clone https://github.com/algorandfoundation/puya.git
cd puya
poetry install
poetry shell

Note that with this method you'll need to activate the virtual environment created by poetry before using the puyapy command in each new shell that you open - you can do this by running poetry shell in the puya directory.

Compiler usage

To check that you can run the puyapy command successfully after that, you can run the help command:

puyapy -h

To compile a contract or contracts, just supply the path(s) - either to the .py files themselves, or the containing directories. In the case of containing directories, any contracts discovered therein will be compiled, allowing you to compile multiple contracts at once. You can also supply more than one path at a time to the compiler.

e.g. puyapy my_project/ or puyapy my_project/contract.py will work to compile a single contract.

Language fundamentals

Contracts

A smart contract is defined within a single class. You can extend other contracts (through inheritance), and also define standalone functions and reference them. This also works across different Python packages - in other words, you can have a Python library with common functions and re-use that library across multiple projects!

All contracts must inherit from the base class puyapy.Contract - either directly or indirectly, which can include inheriting from puyapy.ARC4Contract. For a non-ARC4 contract, a contract class must implement an approval_program and a clear_state_program method. For ARC4 contracts, these methods will be implemented for you, although you can optionally provide a clear_state_program (the default implementation just always approves).

As an example, this is a valid contract that always approves:

import puyapy

class Contract(puyapy.Contract):
    def approval_program(self) -> bool:
        return True
    
    def clear_state_program(self) -> bool:
        return True

The return value of these methods can be either a bool that indicates whether the transaction should approve or not, or a puyapy.UInt64 value, where UInt64(0) indicates that the transaction should be rejected and any other value indicates that it should be approved.

And here is a valid ARC4 contract:

import puyapy

class ABIContract(puyapy.ARC4Contract):
    """This contract can be created, but otherwise does nothing"""
    pass

Primitive types

The primitive types of the AVM, uint64 and bytes[] are represented by puyapy.UInt64 and puyapy.Bytes respectively. puyapy.BigUInt is also available for AVM supported wide-math (up to 512 bits).

Note that Python builtin types such as int cannot be used as variables, for semantic compatibility reasons - however you can define module level constants of this type, and integer literals are permitted in expressions.

For example:

from puyapy import UInt64, subroutine

SCALE = 100000
SCALED_PI = 314159

@subroutine
def circle_area(radius: UInt64) -> UInt64:
    scaled_result = SCALED_PI * radius**2
    result = scaled_result // SCALE
    return result


@subroutine
def circle_area_100() -> UInt64:
    return circle_area(UInt64(100))

Examples

There are many examples in this repo, here are some of the more useful ones that showcase what is possible.

• hello world (arc4)
• voting
• AMM
• auction
• non-ABI calculator
• local storage

The compiled output is available under the out/ directory alongside these, e.g. the approval TEAL for voting is available at examples/voting/out/voting.approval.teal.