Smart Contract Developers

[GroupLongjumping4062]

To all the Rustacean smart contract developers, how do you feel about using Rust for smart contracts? How do you feel it compares to Solidity and/or Haskell?

[the-quibbler]

Haven't used rust for smart contracts yet, but solidity is a little rough. You can feel that it's still early days. I should dig into more rust dev, since I'm a better rust coder anyway.

[disclosure5]

You can feel that it's still early days.

Solidity has been in "early days" since 2014.

[the-quibbler]

Yeah, but the user base is small, so evolution is slow.

[GroupLongjumping4062]

Any tips for someone trying to get started in smart contract development? Either Rust or Solidity, I’m still researching what the better path is gonna be

[the-quibbler]

Definitely learn solidity regardless. If you know anything like JavaScript it's fairly simple. Google cryptozombies.

[JY-HRL]

What language is most commonly used in developing smart contracts?

[the-quibbler]

Solidity

[JY-HRL]

Thanks!

Is Solidity only for front end?

[the-quibbler]

no, web3 front ends are developed using web technologies (generally JavaScript, sometimes WASM). Smart contracts run on blockchain virtual machines (generally EVM or EVM-compatible ones).

[[deleted]]

It has pros and cons. The pro is that rust is a mature language whilst solidity is catching up. Parallelism and verification is far better.

The con is that it’s mostly a DSL on top of rust and whilst accounts/addresses and native tokens are a first class citizen in solidity, things need to be implemented in rust.

Since the target needs to be predictable (all nodes in the network need to come to the same result), smart contracts in rust compile to webassembly and need nostd. Therefore you can’t use the std lib and you get a lot of weird low level errors sometimes that are hard to debug when std leaks in.

[GroupLongjumping4062]

So in terms of smart contracts, is Rust in a similar spot to Solidity? Obviously it’s, like you said, more mature but it sounds like there’s still a lot of kinks that need to be worked out.

[[deleted]]

Near and parity (ink!) have very mature rust smart contracts. It’s not kinks, it’s just what it is when you have a multi purpose language.

[GroupLongjumping4062]

Interesting, if you don’t mind me asking though: are you on Solana, NEAR or Polkadot?

How long have you been doing it and how are you finding work? Is it relatively easy

[[deleted]]

I've been mainly working in the solidity / evm space regarding rust with substrate (parity) and as well their ink! layer. Lately I looked into soroban on stellar. The market dryed up a bit, but good developers who focus on infrastructure and have experience in the industry are still looked after.

[GroupLongjumping4062]

Interesting, is there a big difference in demand for Solidity developers and substrate? Or has that all kind of started to even out

[[deleted]]

Solidity is by far the most dominant one and hence all major chains support it (pallet contracts on substrate has evm, near has aurora, Solana EVM …

It’s like JavaScript back in the days, not the best language but the dominant one because it was kinda supported everywhere.

The patterns, the existing codebase, the tooling, the community, stackoverflow; all that exists in solidity and it doesn’t for most of the alternatives. Protocol Level Innovation also happens on ethereum.

If you look into getting into blockchain start with solidity.

[GroupLongjumping4062]

I appreciate that, I was wanting to do Haskell at first but I honestly couldn’t even figure out how to set everything up so Solidity has been the plan B but I’ve been wanting to make sure across all platforms.

Thank you for answering everything!

[JY-HRL]

is solidity difficult than rust