Explore the series

Building an EVM from scratch part 1 - the execution context

Building an EVM from scratch part 2 - branching instructions

Building an EVM from scratch part 3 - calldata and the function dispatcher

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜ 77/142 instructions implemented

Github branch: smol-evm/evm-from-scratch-pt2

Introduction

In this part, we’re going to expand on our instruction set with a focus on:

• branching instructions
• looping and conditionals
• jump destination validation
• stack manipulation instructions (DUP, SWAP, PUSH)

Let’s go!

Branching Instructions

These instructions let us manipulate the program counter, i.e. the position in the code buffer of the next instruction to run. The spec is fairly straightforward: