Creating .bin

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To compile our Solidity smart contract, we need a compiler. The main solidity compiler is solc.

https://github.com/ethereum/solidity

It's written in C++ and it's a good idea to use a formal release build for your production smart contracts.

That said, getting the C++ version of solc installed can sometimes be a pain. My recommendation is that you install solc before you deploy your first contracts on the production network, but for now, we can use the JavaScript version solcjs.

# this installs solcjs (not the c++ version of solc)
npm install -g solc

Solcjs's core code is generated using Emscripten to convert the C++ version of solc to JavaScript. This means it will work just fine, but know that the command-line options are different.

We can compile our contract by typing this:

solcjs --bin counter.sol

And let's take a look at the output: