Hey HN! I’m a researcher working on Bitcoin smart contracts, and today I’m releasing Bithoven—a high-level imperative language that compiles to native Bitcoin Script (Legacy, SegWit, and Taproot).

The Goal:

Raw Bitcoin Script is notoriously difficult to reason about. Writing raw Bitcoin Script today feels like writing Assembly in the 1970s. You have to mentally juggle the stack (`OP_SWAP`, `OP_ROT`), manually manage distinct execution branches, and pray you didn't leave a stack item unconsumed (which crashes the script). My goal was to bridge the gap between complex contract logic and raw opcodes, allowing developers to write readable, compile-time-safe code.

Key Features:

- Imperative Syntax: Write logic using familiar if/else and return statements instead of mental stack juggling.

- Type Safety: First-class support for bool, signature, string, and number types to prevent runtime errors.

- Targeted Compilation: Support for Legacy, SegWit, and Taproot compilation targets.

- Native Primitives: Built-in keywords for timelocks (older, after) and cryptography (sha256, checksig).

You can try it in the browser here (runs via WASM): https://bithoven-lang.github.io/bithoven/ide/

Here is an example of a Hashed Time-Locked Contract (HTLC):

  (condition: bool, sig_alice: signature)
  (condition: bool, preimage: string, sig_bob: signature)
  {
      if condition {
          // Relative locktime (Sequence)
          older 1000;
          return checksig (sig_alice, alice_pk);
      } else {
          // Hashlock verification
          verify sha256 sha256 preimage == hash;
          return checksig (sig_bob, bob_pk);
      }
  }

The project is free open source and the academic paper is currently under review. I’d love to hear any feedback. Thanks for checking it out!