been going through the Compact section for the past two days and honestly the more i think about what the compiler actually does the more i realize it is carrying more weight than most people give it credit for 😂
here is the problem Compact is solving
ZK proofs are powerful but writing ZK circuits directly requires deep cryptographic expertise. the kind of expertise that most application developers do not have and should not need. if midnight required every developer to understand Halo2 proving systems and PLONKish arithmetization just to build a privacy-preserving app, the developer pool would be tiny and the network would never reach commercial scale.
Compact solves this by sitting between the developer and the ZK layer entirely. developers write smart contracts in a TypeScript-based domain-specific language. Compact looks and behaves like TypeScript. it handles shielded and unshielded data, public and private state, on-chain and off-chain interactions. to the developer it reads like a normal programming environment.
underneath, the Compact compiler takes that contract code and generates two things. first, the cryptographic materials needed for ZK proofs - the actual circuit descriptions in PLONKish arithmetization that the proving system will use
second, the circuit descriptions themselves, which enforce the terms of the smart contract while keeping private data shielded. the developer writes TypeScript
the compiler produces the ZK machinery.
what this gets right is the abstraction
the entire promise of midnight as an accessible privacy platform rests on not requiring developers to become cryptographers. Compact delivers that. a developer who has never seen a ZK circuit can write a contract that produces valid ZK proofs because the compiler handles the translation.
but heres the thing i keep sitting with. that abstraction creates a dependency that runs all the way down.
every single application deployed on midnight inherits its circuit quality from whatever the Compact compiler produces. if the compiler generates inefficient circuits for a given contract pattern, every app using that pattern inherits the inefficiency. there is no path around the compiler at the application layer
developers cannot optimize their own circuits because the compiler owns that layer completely.
and circuit quality is not a minor concern. proof generation time, proof size, verification cost, transaction throughput - all of these are functions of how well the compiler translates contract code into ZK circuits. a suboptimal compiler does not just slow one app
it sets a ceiling for every app on the network simultaneously.
honestly dont know if the Compact compiler is the right abstraction that makes midnight genuinely accessible to a broad developer base without sacrificing the efficiency that specific ZK circuits are supposed to deliver or a single point of optimization dependency that quietly caps what the entire network can achieve until the compiler itself improves??
#night @MidnightNetwork $NIGHT
