Smart Contract Development
Languages for Deploying Decentralized Applications on ATLETA
Indexing ~6,900 full-time and ~22,400 monthly active developers working in the Web3 space for the entire year of 2023, Crypto as a category is extremely early. Compared to the over ~28,500,000 developers worldwide (and growing year-on-year), crypto has captured a tiny fraction (0.024% / 0.078% ) of the addressable talent/mindshare.
The reason for this is two-fold; first, the lack of a universal development language and second, the associated learning curve.
Web3 has been taxing developers with excessive innovations attempting to introduce more complex, customized languages. Regardless of whether they are derivatives of Javascript or not, imposing a new programming paradigm and forcing developers to learn/re-learn something has been a massive deterrent.
At this moment in time, the vast majority of development has aggregated around Ethereum and the EVM (due to its first-mover advantage) with Solidity becoming the standard underpinning 90% plus of the industry's smart contracts. However, the industry has realized that in order to truly scale to a global level, it must scale in every vector, and that means the amount of developers involved.
In an attempt to bypass the current constraints holding developers from joining the industry ATLETA has purposely synthesized a broader toolkit of languages and frameworks to support the development of smart contracts.
Development in ATLETA can take place in Solidity and the Rust-based Solidity derivative INK!
Solidity
The most widely used, high-level, object-oriented language in Web3 is designed to develop EVM applications. With its syntax derived from Javascript, Solidity has much overlap in features, including inheritance, libraries, and complex user-defined types, which decrease the onboarding curve for developers.
Being the pioneering language for smart contract development, Solidity hosts the most robust development ecosystem with extensive documentation, libraries, and tools (including truffle, remix, Hardhat, et al.) to facilitate deployment, testing frameworks, and community support forums. The maturity of dev infrastructure has led to Solidity being the dominant language on alternative L1s (including Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, et al.) and L2s (including Optimism, Arbitrum, and zkSync).
INK!
An embedded domain-specific domain language for developing smart contracts on substrate-based chains in the Rust programming language that compiles into WASM. Inheriting all of the benefits of its host language, Rust (sequencing, conditionals, iteration, functions, etc.), INK! adds primitives that allow programmers to work at higher levels of abstraction and interact with Solidity code.
With more languages and tooling at their disposal, ATLETA intends to enrich the developer experience for existing Web3 developers and bring a new caliber of builders into the industry.
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