Simpler ways to access the ABI?

[cymatic9]

I'm in Lesson 4, "Remix Fund Me". In part 5 of that lesson, "Interfaces and Price Feeds" (around 4:05:50 in the video), to get the ABI of the Chainlink data feed, Patrick pastes the interface definition from the Chainlink code into his smart contract that he's building. I think he said there are easier ways to get the ABI, but I didn't see any further mention of it in this section.

Are there easier ways to get the ABI from other contracts, such as the Chainlink contracts? It seems strange that you'd need to copy/paste other people's code into your own code just to be able to access their endpoints.

UPDATE: so in the very next section, "Importing from GitHub and NPM", Patrick shows how you can use import statements to more simply pull the interface code into your smart contract. Is this the best and most efficient way to access another contract's ABI? Is there any more direct way of accessing another contract's ABI without the potential bloat of pulling in all that code? (I assume to minimize on the cost of deploying our contracts, we want to keep them as small and tight as possible)

[cromewar]

Hello @cymatic9
What a good question and the answer is no, but with biases.
The actual easier way to access to a contract ABI is importing the interfaces, which have all the function you will need, but without the implementation so their file size is really small. This is what most of developers are used to do as is just a straight forward approach.

However this answer would be incomplete if I do not mention the other ways to get the ABI from a contract.

1. IF the contract is verified on Etherscan you can access easily to the ABI with their API
2. Using Jeb in Action, which is a smart contact decompiler making some revers engineer stuff, I actually do not recommend use this as it take a lot to decompile and is not always the best but if you want to give it a check, please refer here
3. I'm not 100% sure on this las one but Mythril a tool used for audits could also get you the ABI of a contract, you can check the project here.

As you can see the alternatives would take more time and effort than just use a interface to get the ABI.

Cheers, Vasiliy.

[cymatic9]

Thank you Vasiliy, great answer!

[PatrickAlphaC]

Vasiliy is killin it !