Solidity v0.6.0 Breaking Changes

This section highlights the main breaking changes introduced in Solidity version 0.6.0, along with the reasoning behind the changes and how to update affected code. For the full list check the release changelog.

Changes the Compiler Might not Warn About

This section lists changes where the behaviour of your code might change without the compiler telling you about it.

The resulting type of an exponentiation is the type of the base. It used to be the smallest type that can hold both the type of the base and the type of the exponent, as with symmetric operations. Additionally, signed types are allowed for the base of the exponentiation.

Explicitness Requirements

This section lists changes where the code now needs to be more explicit, but the semantics do not change. For most of the topics the compiler will provide suggestions.

Functions can now only be overridden when they are either marked with the virtual keyword or defined in an interface. Functions without implementation outside an interface have to be marked virtual. When overriding a function or modifier, the new keyword override must be used. When overriding a function or modifier defined in multiple parallel bases, all bases must be listed in parentheses after the keyword like so: override(Base1, Base2).
Member-access to length of arrays is now always read-only, even for storage arrays. It is no longer possible to resize storage arrays by assigning a new value to their length. Use push(), push(value) or pop() instead, or assign a full array, which will of course overwrite the existing content. The reason behind this is to prevent storage collisions of gigantic storage arrays.
The new keyword abstract can be used to mark contracts as abstract. It has to be used if a contract does not implement all its functions. Abstract contracts cannot be created using the new operator, and it is not possible to generate bytecode for them during compilation.
Libraries have to implement all their functions, not only the internal ones.
The names of variables declared in inline assembly may no longer end in _slot or _offset.
Variable declarations in inline assembly may no longer shadow any declaration outside the inline assembly block. If the name contains a dot, its prefix up to the dot may not conflict with any declaration outside the inline assembly block.
State variable shadowing is now disallowed. A derived contract can only declare a state variable x, if there is no visible state variable with the same name in any of its bases.

Semantic and Syntactic Changes

This section lists changes where you have to modify your code and it does something else afterwards.

Conversions from external function types to address are now disallowed. Instead external function types have a member called address, similar to the existing selector member.
The function push(value) for dynamic storage arrays does not return the new length anymore (it returns nothing).
The unnamed function commonly referred to as « fallback function » was split up into a new fallback function that is defined using the fallback keyword and a receive ether function defined using the receive keyword.
- If present, the receive ether function is called whenever the call data is empty (whether or not ether is received). This function is implicitly payable.
- The new fallback function is called when no other function matches (if the receive ether function does not exist then this includes calls with empty call data). You can make this function payable or not. If it is not payable then transactions not matching any other function which send value will revert. You should only need to implement the new fallback function if you are following an upgrade or proxy pattern.

New Features

This section lists things that were not possible prior to Solidity 0.6.0 or were more difficult to achieve.

The try/catch statement allows you to react on failed external calls.
struct and enum types can be declared at file level.
Array slices can be used for calldata arrays, for example abi.decode(msg.data[4:], (uint, uint)) is a low-level way to decode the function call payload.
Natspec supports multiple return parameters in developer documentation, enforcing the same naming check as @param.
Yul and Inline Assembly have a new statement called leave that exits the current function.
Conversions from address to address payable are now possible via payable(x), where x must be of type address.

Interface Changes

This section lists changes that are unrelated to the language itself, but that have an effect on the interfaces of the compiler. These may change the way how you use the compiler on the command line, how you use its programmable interface, or how you analyze the output produced by it.

New Error Reporter

A new error reporter was introduced, which aims at producing more accessible error messages on the command line. It is enabled by default, but passing --old-reporter falls back to the the deprecated old error reporter.

Metadata Hash Options

The compiler now appends the IPFS hash of the metadata file to the end of the bytecode by default (for details, see documentation on contract metadata). Before 0.6.0, the compiler appended the Swarm hash by default, and in order to still support this behaviour, the new command line option --metadata-hash was introduced. It allows you to select the hash to be produced and appended, by passing either ipfs or swarm as value to the --metadata-hash command line option. Passing the value none completely removes the hash.

These changes can also be used via the Standard JSON Interface and effect the metadata JSON generated by the compiler.

The recommended way to read the metadata is to read the last two bytes to determine the length of the CBOR encoding and perform a proper decoding on that data block as explained in the metadata section.

Yul Optimizer

Together with the legacy bytecode optimizer, the Yul optimizer is now enabled by default when you call the compiler with --optimize. It can be disabled by calling the compiler with --no-optimize-yul. This mostly affects code that uses ABI coder v2.

C API Changes

The client code that uses the C API of libsolc is now in control of the memory used by the compiler. To make this change consistent, solidity_free was renamed to solidity_reset, the functions solidity_alloc and solidity_free were added and solidity_compile now returns a string that must be explicitly freed via solidity_free().

How to update your code

This section gives detailed instructions on how to update prior code for every breaking change.

Change address(f) to f.address for f being of external function type.
Replace function () external [payable] { ... } by either receive() external payable { ... }, fallback() external [payable] { ... } or both. Prefer using a receive function only, whenever possible.
Change uint length = array.push(value) to array.push(value);. The new length can be accessed via array.length.
Change array.length++ to array.push() to increase, and use pop() to decrease the length of a storage array.
For every named return parameter in a function’s @dev documentation define a @return entry which contains the parameter’s name as the first word. E.g. if you have function f() defined like function f() public returns (uint value) and a @dev annotating it, document its return parameters like so: @return value The return value.. You can mix named and un-named return parameters documentation so long as the notices are in the order they appear in the tuple return type.
Choose unique identifiers for variable declarations in inline assembly that do not conflict with declarations outside the inline assembly block.
Add virtual to every non-interface function you intend to override. Add virtual to all functions without implementation outside interfaces. For single inheritance, add override to every overriding function. For multiple inheritance, add override(A, B, ..), where you list all contracts that define the overridden function in the parentheses. When multiple bases define the same function, the inheriting contract must override all conflicting functions.