Referencing an external plutus script

Question

I would like to understand how one can reference an external plutus script in one transaction. In solidity (for the other script), one can import the contract interface into their script, create an object using the smart contract address and then call the visible functions of the other script (as below).

address token = 0xE592427A0AEce92De3Edee1F18E0157C05861564;
IERC20(token).totalSupply();

I presume to achieve a similar effect in plutus, you would need to perform this all in the off-chain Contract code? And in order to do all of this you would need both the code for the other script as well as the address?

Answer 1

Reference Scripts, the ability for a transaction to reference scripts from a prior transaction is scheduled to be available later this year, sometime in June I believe. https://github.com/cardano-foundation/CIPs/pull/161

However, I'm not sure this will be what you're looking for. In Solidity, smart contracts are like recipes: do X, then do Y, and then do Z. On Cardano, a validator (smart contract) is a function that return a boolean representing whether the provided transaction may spend the funds may, yes or no?

Because of this difference, contract composition will look different. Composability on Solidity resembles a micro service architecture, each service (contract) can synchronously call other services (contracts) via an exposed api. Composability on Cardano, on the other hand, will more closely resemble an event driven ecosystem (or FRP). Services will emit events that can be consumed to trigger downstream events.