Competition Simplicity - Glow-Lang/glow GitHub Wiki

Simplicity is the main smart contract language for Blockstream's Liquid Network.

Simplicity is a functional language that can express finitary computations only, rebuilding everything from bits and pairs. See Russell O'Connor: "Simplicity: A New Language for Blockchains".

Simplicity does indeed have a lot of simplicity, but mostly at the wrong level: finite computations are great when you can reduce your computation to that... but then the entire difficulty becomes this reduction, that Simplicity requires but doesn't provide. An obvious answer to reducing arbitrary computations to a finite one is zk-SNARK's; but at that point, Simplicity is just an "abstraction inversion": it's a very awkward backend for zk-SNARK's; in practice a specialized zk-SNARK's "JET" (Urbit-style Just-In-Time pattern recognition and compilation) would be used, and then why not just short-circuit the entire Simplicity layer entirely? In the end, it's a great conceptual exercise, and a terrible solution.