Release: SpaceCraft SDK v0.65.0

Overview

The central theme of v0.65.0 is improving the experience of writing blackbox tests. The MultiversX framework supports two testing paradigms: the older mandos JSON scenario format and the modern Rust blackbox testing style. This release bridges the two, making it easy to produce and grow a suite of blackbox tests.

VM improvements

Several internal cleanups were made to the Rust VM:

- DebugHandle now holds a weak pointer to TxContext instead of a strong one. This fixes LLDB pretty-printer behavior when inspecting values after a transaction completes, since the handle could have previously kept TxContext alive past its natural lifetime.

- Signal error messages that contain non-UTF-8 bytes are now displayed using lossy decoding instead of crashing.

- The VMAddress alias has been removed. Code should use Address directly.

- The Shareable trait and with_shared_mut_ref helper were removed. These were internal VM infrastructure that is no longer needed.

Blackbox test improvements: scen-blackbox

The flagship feature of v0.65.0 is the scen-blackbox tool, added as a new sc-meta standalone command. Its purpose is to make it easier to build and grow a blackbox test suite, by automatically generating Rust blackbox tests from existing mandos .scen.json scenario files.

The command is invoked as:

   sc-meta convert-scenarios

It reads the contract's ABI and scenario files and produces strongly-typed Rust code that exercises the blackbox testing API. The following aspects of mandos scenarios are fully translated: deploy, call, and query steps; EGLD and ESDT payments including multi-transfers; scalar, variadic, OptionalValue::None, and IgnoreValue arguments; token and address constants extracted as named Rust declarations; H256 constants; epoch, round, nonce, timestamp, and duration block info; error expectations; set-state for account balances, ESDT token state, and storage; and external .steps.json step file references.

The tool was validated by regenerating tests for digital-cash, ping-pong-egld, payable-features, order-book, and crypto-zombies.

Note that manual or AI interventions are necessary after generating the code.

ABI changes

Two additions were made to the ABI format, primarily to support the scen-blackbox generator:

- rustMethodName is now included in the JSON ABI for each endpoint, where it differs from the endpoint name. This allows the generator to emit correct Rust proxy method calls.

- A specificType field was added, used to distinguish TimestampSeconds, TimestampMillis, DurationSeconds, and DurationMillis from plain u64 values. Without it, the generator could not emit the right Rust type for time-related arguments.

- PaymentMultiValue ABI fix: a bug in its ABI description was corrected.

TypeAbi changes

- TypeAbiUniversalInput was added, allowing developers to bypass proxy argument type restrictions when needed.

- The IgnoreValue blanket TypeAbiFrom implementation was removed, as it conflicted with TypeAbiUniversalInput.

- ScenarioValueRaw was introduced as an alias for TypeAbiUniversalInput over BytesValue. The scen-blackbox tool uses it as a placeholder when it cannot determine the appropriate typed value for a mandos argument.

Testing improvements

Several smaller improvements make writing blackbox tests more convenient:

Transaction ids are now supported in tests. The unified syntax allows capturing or asserting the transaction hash or nonce produced by a call, which is useful when correlating a test call with on-chain results.

Address and H256 now have const constructors from hex string literals, replacing the hex-literal crate dependency. This makes it easy to declare typed address and hash constants in test setup code.

Payment API additions:

- .payment() calls can now be chained on a transaction, and are automatically merged into a multi-payment at compile time. .esdt() and .multi_esdt() are deprecated in favor of .payment().

- NonZeroBigUint gained one(), try_from for integer primitive types and NonZero variants, and comparison operators against BigUint.

- Payment::try_new now accepts a generic error type.

- MultiEgldOrEsdtPayment to PaymentVec conversion now includes a validity check. Scenario payments use PaymentVec internally instead of MultiEgldOrEsdtPayment.

- TestTokenIdentifier has been renamed to TestTokenId, matching the TokenId naming from v0.64.0. The old name is kept as a deprecated alias.

Deprecations:

- MultiEsdtPayment is deprecated, superseded by PaymentVec.

- TestEsdtTransfer is deprecated; Payment is used instead.

- .commit() in the blackbox set/check account API is deprecated; state is applied immediately without it.

Codec fixes and improvements

- A bool encoding and decoding was simplified and optimized.

- A bug in num-bigint encoding was fixed.

- MultiValueVec received new constructors and unit tests.

- Inline annotations were adjusted for better performance and consistency.

Dependency upgrades

- reqwest was upgraded and the TLS backend was switched to rustls, a pure-Rust implementation. This removes the OpenSSL dependency and improves portability.

- Other dependencies were upgraded to their latest versions.

LLDB pretty-printer fix

The LLDB Python formatter (multiversx_sc_lldb_pretty_printers.py) was updated to handle the DebugHandle structural changes described above.

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