Serpent is an assembly language that compiles to EVM code that is extended with various high-level features. It can be useful for writing code that requires low-level opcode manipulation as well as access to high-level primitives like the ABI.

Being a low-level language, Serpent is NOT RECOMMENDED for building applications unless you really really know what you're doing. The creator recommends Solidity as a default choice, LLL if you want close-to-the-metal optimizations, or Viper if you like its features though it is still experimental.

make && sudo make install

Testing is done using pytest and tox.

$ pip install tox -r requirements-dev.txt

To run the test suite in your current python version:

$ py.test

To run the full test suite across all supported python versions:

$ tox