DEDennisP·Sep 30, 2017
Sure, but I'm not aware of any language with an optimizer that minimizes permanent storage (for example).
The gas model has been forced to be a close representation of actual costs, because last year it wasn't close enough, and someone took advantage of that to launch denial of service attacks.
Incidentally, last year someone wrote an Idris backend compiling to EVM for their doctoral thesis. They concluded that it had some benefits but not as much as they expected. [1]
There's an effort in progress to migrate from the existing EVM to a modified webassembly [2], which would allow usage of existing languages, and potentially improve performance significantly. It's still experimental and may or may not work out, but seems to be making good progress. [3]
With the existing EVM there are new languages in development that may improve matters, in
Read the rest
cluding Viper [4] (by Vitalik) and Bamboo [5] (by someone the Ethereum Foundation employs to work on formal proofs).
[1] https://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/234939...
[2] https://github.com/ewasm/evm2wasm
[3] https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/08/23/roundup-5/
[4] https://github.com/ethereum/viper
[5] https://github.com/pirapira/bamboo