Merge pull request #275 from chamitro/master

add seminar for EMSE  conference

content/seminars/2024-10-02.md

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+title: Broken Agreement: The Evolution of Solidity Error Handling
+presenter: Charalambos Mitropoulos, TUC
+date: 2024-10-02
+time: 14:30
+category: seminars
+
+Background. A smart contract is a computer program enclosing 
+the terms of a legal agreement between two or more parties which
+is automatically verified and executed via a computer network
+called blockchain. Once a smart contract transaction is completed
+the blockchain is updated and the transaction cannot be changed
+anymore. This implies that any error codified in the smart contract
+program cannot be rectified. Therefore, it is of vital importance
+that developers of smart contracts properly exploit error handling
+to prevent issues during and after the contract execution. Existing
+programming languages for smart contracts, support developers
+in this task by providing a set of Error Handling (EH) features.
+However, it is unclear the extent to which developers effectively
+use EH in practice. Aims. Our work aims to fill this gap by em-
+pirically investigating the state of practice on the adoption of EH
+features of one of the most popular programming languages for
+smart contracts, namely Solidity. Method. We empirically analyse
+the usage of EH features in 283K unique open-source Solidity smart
+contracts for the Ethereum blockchain. Results. Our analysis of
+the documentation of the different versions of Solidity coupled
+with the empirical evaluation of the EH uses and misuses found
+in real-word smart contracts, indicate that, among other things,
+Solidity EH features have been changing frequently across versions,
+and that the adoption of most of the Solidity EH features has been
+limited in practice. However, we observe an upward trend in the
+usage of the require EH feature, which is specifically designed for
+smart contract development. Conclusions. The insights from our
+study could help developers improve their EH practice as well as
+designers of smart contract programming languages to equip their
+language with appropriate EH features.