Code Organization

A Miden assembly program is just a sequence of instructions each describing a specific directive or an operation. You can use any combination of whitespace characters to separate one instruction from another.

In turn, Miden assembly instructions are just keywords which can be parameterized by zero or more parameters. The notation for specifying parameters is keyword.param1.param2 - i.e., the parameters are separated by periods. For example, push.123 instruction denotes a push operation which is parameterized by value 123.

Miden assembly programs are organized into procedures. Procedures, in turn, can be grouped into modules.

Procedures

A procedure can be used to encapsulate a frequently-used sequence of instructions which can later be invoked via a label. A procedure must start with a proc.<label>.<number of locals> instruction and terminate with an end instruction. For example:

proc.foo.2
    <instructions>
end

A procedure label must start with a letter and can contain any combination of numbers, ASCII letters, and underscores (_). Should you need to represent a label with other characters, an extended set is permitted via quoted identifiers, i.e. an identifier surrounded by "..". Quoted identifiers additionally allow any alphanumeric letter (ASCII or UTF-8), as well as various common punctuation characters: !, ?, :, ., <, >, and -. Quoted identifiers are primarily intended for representing symbols/identifiers when compiling higher-level languages to Miden Assembly, but can be used anywhere that normal identifiers are expected.

The number of locals specifies the number of memory-based local words a procedure can access (via loc_load, loc_store, and other instructions). If a procedure doesn't need any memory-based locals, this parameter can be omitted or set to 0. A procedure can have at most $2^{16}$ locals, and the total number of locals available to all procedures at runtime is limited to $2^{30}$ .

To execute a procedure, the exec.<label>, call.<label>, and syscall.<label> instructions can be used. For example:

exec.foo

The difference between using each of these instructions is explained in the next section.

A procedure may execute any other procedure, however recursion is not currently permitted, due to limitations imposed by the Merkalized Abstract Syntax Tree. Recursion is caught by static analysis of the call graph during assembly, so in general you don't need to think about this, but it is a limitation to be aware of. For example, the following code block defines a program with two procedures:

proc.bar
    <instructions>
    exec.foo
    <instructions>
end

proc.foo
    <instructions>
end

begin
    <instructions>
    exec.bar
    <instructions>
    exec.foo
end

Dynamic procedure invocation

It is also possible to invoke procedures dynamically - i.e., without specifying target procedure labels at compile time. Unlike static procedure invocation, recursion is technically possible using dynamic invocation, but dynamic invocation is more expensive, and has less available operand stack capacity for procedure arguments, as 4 elements are required for the MAST root of the callee. There are two instructions, dynexec and dyncall, which can be used to execute dynamically-specified code targets. Both instructions expect the MAST root of the target to be provided via the stack. The difference between dynexec and dyncall corresponds to the difference between exec and call, see the documentation on procedure invocation semantics for more detail.

Dynamic code execution in the same context is achieved by setting the top $4$ elements of the stack to the hash of the dynamic code block and then executing the dynexec or dyncall instruction. You can obtain the hash of a procedure in the current program, by name, using the procref instruction. See the following example of pairing the two:

procref.foo
dynexec

During assembly, the procref.foo instruction is compiled to a push.HASH, where HASH is the hash of the MAST root of the foo procedure.

During execution of the dynexec instruction, the VM does the following:

Reads, but does not consume, the top 4 elements of the stack to get the hash of the dynamic target (i.e. the operand stack is left unchanged).
Load the code block referenced by the hash, or trap if no such MAST root is known.
Execute the loaded code block

The dyncall instruction is used the same way, with the difference that it involves a context switch to a new context when executing the referenced block, and switching back to the calling context once execution of the callee completes.

Note: In both cases, the stack is left unchanged. Therefore, if the dynamic code is intended to manipulate the stack, it should start by either dropping or moving the code block hash from the top of the stack.

Modules

A module consists of one or more procedures. There are two types of modules: library modules and executable modules (also called programs).

Library modules

Library modules contain zero or more internal procedures and one or more exported procedures. For example, the following module defines one internal procedure (defined with proc instruction) and one exported procedure (defined with export instruction):

proc.foo
    <instructions>
end

export.bar
    <instructions>
    exec.foo
    <instructions>
end

Programs

Executable modules are used to define programs. A program contains zero or more internal procedures (defined with proc instruction) and exactly one main procedure (defined with begin instruction). For example, the following module defines one internal procedure and a main procedure:

proc.foo
    <instructions>
end

begin
    <instructions>
    exec.foo
    <instructions>
end

A program cannot contain any exported procedures.

When a program is executed, the execution starts at the first instruction following the begin instruction. The main procedure is expected to be the last procedure in the program and can be followed only by comments.

Importing modules

To reference items in another module, you must either import the module you wish to use, or specify a fully-qualified path to the item you want to reference.

To import a module, you must use the use keyword in the top level scope of the current module, as shown below:

use.std::math::u64

begin
  ...
end

In this example, the std::math::u64 module is imported as u64, the default "alias" for the imported module. You can specify a different alias like so:

use.std::math::u64->bigint

This would alias the imported module as bigint rather than u64. The alias is needed to reference items from the imported module, as shown below:

use.std::math::u64

begin
    push.1.0
    push.2.0
    exec.u64::wrapping_add
end

You can also bypass imports entirely, and specify an absolute procedure path, which requires prefixing the path with ::. For example:

begin
  push.1.0
  push.2.0
  exec.::std::math::u64::wrapping_add
end

In the examples above, we have been referencing the std::math::u64 module, which is a module in the Miden Standard Library. There are a number of useful modules there, that provide a variety of helpful functionality out of the box.

If the assembler does not know about the imported modules, assembly will fail. You can register modules with the assembler when instantiating it, either in source form, or precompiled form. See the miden-assembly docs for details. The assembler will use this information to resolve references to imported procedures during assembly.

Re-exporting procedures

A procedure defined in one module can be re-exported from a different module under the same or a different name. For example:

use.std::math::u64

export.u64::add
export.u64::mul->mul64

export.foo
    <instructions>
end

In the module shown above, not only is the locally-defined procedure foo exported, but so are two procedures named add and mul64, whose implementations are defined in the std::math::u64 module.

Similar to procedure invocation, you can bypass the explicit import by specifying an absolute path, like so:

export.::std::math::u64::mul->mul64

Additionally, you may re-export a procedure using its MAST root, so long as you specify an alias:

export.0x0000..0000->mul64

In all of the forms described above, the actual implementation of the re-exported procedure is defined externally. Other modules which reference the re-exported procedure, will have those references resolved to the original procedure during assembly.

Constants

Miden assembly supports constant declarations. These constants are scoped to the module they are defined in and can be used as immediate parameters for Miden assembly instructions. Constants are supported as immediate values for many of the instructions in the Miden Assembly instruction set, see the documentation for specific instructions to determine whether or not it provides a form which accepts immediate operands.

Constants must be declared right after module imports and before any procedures or program bodies. A constant's name must start with an upper-case letter and can contain any combination of numbers, upper-case ASCII letters, and underscores (_). The number of characters in a constant name cannot exceed 100.

A constant's value must be in a decimal or hexidecimal form and be in the range between $0$ and $2^{64} - 2^{32}$ (both inclusive). Value can be defined by an arithmetic expression using +, -, *, /, //, (, ) operators and references to the previously defined constants if it uses only decimal numbers. Here / is a field division and // is an integer division. Note that the arithmetic expression cannot contain spaces.

use.std::math::u64

const.CONSTANT_1=100
const.CONSTANT_2=200+(CONSTANT_1-50)
const.ADDR_1=3

begin
    push.CONSTANT_1.CONSTANT_2
    exec.u64::wrapping_add
    mem_store.ADDR_1
end

Comments

Miden assembly allows annotating code with simple comments. There are two types of comments: single-line comments which start with a # (pound) character, and documentation comments which start with #! characters. For example:

#! This is a documentation comment
export.foo
    # this is a comment
    push.1
end

Documentation comments must precede a procedure declaration. Using them inside a procedure body is an error.