Skip to content

Building the Contract with pchain_compile

pchain_compile is a CLI build tool for smart contract developers to build their source code to WASM binaries for deployment on ParallelChain Mainnet.

The WASM binary generated from a generic cargo build process has the following disadvantages:

  • The build process is not toolchain version agnostic i.e. it does not guarantee uniform WASM binaries with different versions of compiler and rust crate dependencies. This will make it difficult for smart contract developers to verify their source code on the blockchain.

  • The build process generates a large file size, which leads to higher gas costs for deployment and contract calls.

pchain_compile solves these shortcomings by:

  • Executing the build process in a docker environment with pre-defined toolchain versioning.

  • Optimizing and compressing the size of the WASM binary with the help of wasm-snip and wasm-opt packages.

Downloading pchain_compile

pchain_compile supports Linux, macOS and Windows. Depending on the operating system, they can be downloaded from Assets of ParallelChain Lab's Git Hub release page.

The binary can also be installed and built by executing the following commands: 

cargo install pchain_compile

Pre-requisites

pchain_compile builds the source code in a docker environment. To know more about Docker and install it, refer to the official instructions.

Build WASM Binary

In order to build a WASM binary of the smart contract, run the following command:

./pchain_compile build --source <PATH_TO_SMART_CONTRACT_CODE>

./pchain_compile.exe build --source <PATH_TO_SMART_CONTRACT_CODE>

If you installed pchain_compile with cargo install, you can simply run:

pchain_compile build --source <PATH_TO_SMART_CONTRACT_CODE>

A .wasm file will be generated in the current directory. It will be needed for the next section.