Mitropoulos, Charalambos;
Kechagia, Maria;
Maschas, Chrysostomos;
Ioannidis, Sotirios;
Sarro, Federica;
Mitropoulos, Dimitrios;
(2024)
Broken Agreement: The Evolution of Solidity Error Handling.
In:
ESEM '24: Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measuremen.
(pp. pp. 257-268).
ACM/IEEE
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Abstract
Background. A smart contract is a computer program enclosing the terms of a legal agreement between two or more parties which is automatically verified and executed via a computer network called blockchain. Once a smart contract transaction is completed the blockchain is updated and the transaction cannot be changed anymore. This implies that any error codified in the smart contract program cannot be rectified. Therefore, it is of vital importance that developers of smart contracts properly exploit error handling to prevent issues during and after the contract execution. Existing programming languages for smart contracts, support developers in this task by providing a set of Error Handling (EH) features. However, it is unclear the extent to which developers effectively use EH in practice. Aims. Our work aims to fill this gap by empirically investigating the state of practice on the adoption of EH features of one of the most popular programming languages for smart contracts, namely Solidity. Method. We empirically analyse the usage of EH features in 283K unique open-source Solidity smart contracts for the Ethereum blockchain. Results. Our analysis of the documentation of the different versions of Solidity coupled with the empirical evaluation of the EH uses and misuses found in real-word smart contracts, indicate that, among other things, Solidity EH features have been changing frequently across versions, and that the adoption of most of the Solidity EH features has been limited in practice. However, we observe an upward trend in the usage of the require EH feature, which is specifically designed for smart contract development. Conclusions. The insights from our study could help developers improve their EH practice as well as designers of smart contract programming languages to equip their language with appropriate EH features.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | Broken Agreement: The Evolution of Solidity Error Handling |
| Event: | International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measureme |
| Location: | Barcelona, Spain |
| Dates: | 24 Oct 2024 - 25 Oct 2024 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1145/3674805.368668 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1145/3674805.3686686 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. The images or other third-party material in this article are included in the Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| Keywords: | Solidity, smart contracts, error handling, software evolution |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10205027 |
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