Noir Debugger

Partner

Aztec Labs is building the Aztec Network, a fairer, more open financial ecosystem with encryption at its core. This network is a fully programmable private ZK-rollup built on Ethereum.

In alignment with that vision, Aztec Labs developed Noir, an open source Domain Specific Language for safe and seamless construction of privacy-preserving Zero-Knowledge proofs (ZKP). Noir uses simple and flexible syntax and, requires no previous knowledge on the underlying mathematics or cryptography. Zero-Knowledge programs can generate short proofs of a certain statement without revealing inputs into the program.

Requirements & Context

Development Experience is a core tenet to Aztec's vision for Noir. As a result, they not only invest a lot of care and dedication on language design, but they also foster the development of a rich ecosystem of developer tools.

In the context of that effort, they entrusted Manas with developing a debugger for Noir programs.

Given that Noir is an open source project, all of our development is open source in the Noir's Github repository, adopting Noir's standard contributor guidelines.

Approach

In order to achieve our goal, we needed to introduce a number of enhancements to Noir's compiler, particularly to allow managed step by step execution at runtime.

We also introduced an instrumentation layer which can be enabled when compiling in debug mode. This instrumentation layer operates on the program's AST to keep track of runtime state and make it externally observable by the debugger.

Finally, we implemented the DAP protocol for the debugger, necessary for IDE based debugger UIs to interact with the language runtime.

Results

In less than 4 months of work, we succeeded in delivering a first feature-rich version of the debugger. The debugger is made available to Noir programmers in two functionally equivalent forms: as a REPL based debugger, and in VS Code as part of the official Noir VS Code extension.

The debugger has shipped with Noir since version 0.27. You can read its documentation here.

As more Noir developers start using the debugger, we will be helping the Noir team at Aztec Labs collect user feedback from the community, from which we expect to identify potential improvements and new features to help make the experience of debugging Noir programs even better!