Long-term L1 execution layer proposal: replace the EVM with RISC-V

[GCdePaula]

Yes, please

@vbuterin

replace the EVM with RISC-V

What ISA exactly in the RISC-V family were you considering?

@vbuterin

One precedent for this is the Nervos CKB VM, which is basically RISC-V.

Another one, more mature, is the Cartesi Machine, which is proper RISC-V. Specifically rv64gc — it even boots Linux and runs Doom!

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@AdamCochran

but very little benefit for the L2 model.

If the L2s also become RISC-V, keeping L1 compatibility, wouldn’t they see (in their execution environment) a similar speedup?

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@levs57

run contracts as executables, without interpretation overhead.

I really don’t get this part, can you give more details?

@levs57

LLVM has a lot of compiler bugs.

The scale at which LLVM and GGC are used is ridiculously higher than the Solidity compiler. I believe this is one of the most important metrics for security. Personally, I’d bet on LLVM and GCC. If that’s not enough, there’s always CompCert, which also targets RISC-V.

@levs57

None of RISC-V vms are production ready

Perhaps true for zkVMs, but not true for non-zkVMs.