Bytecode

Now that we have the EVM we can talk a little more about the Bytecode. Bytecode is executed by the EVM.

Valid Bytecode is simply a list of valid opcodes and their operands. We call a list of opcodes and their operands a program.

Simple Push

The program that pushes 0x42 on the stack would look like this.

SIMPLE_PUSH = [0x60, 0x42]

or simply: 0x6042

Instructions and Data

As you can see, the bytecode consists of both instructions and data. It is up to the program writer to make sure that data and instructions are not mixed up.

This is what we call the von Neumann architecture.

Simple Add

Another simple program could look like this. Here we push 0x42 and 0xFF on the stack and add them together and put the result back onto the stack.

SIMPLE_ADD = [0x60, 0x42, 0x60, 0xFF, 0x01]

After executing this we should have a stack with exactly one element 321 on it.

In the next step we will use the EVM that we built to actually execute these programs.