The Starknet Mainnet Quantum Leap is a breakthrough in scaling Ethereum!
Devs are expanding their skills to include the easy to learn Cairo.
Solidity is a well-known smart contract language, but why tf are devs moving to Cairo???
Simple.. we explain. 👇
Solidity made global interoperable smart contracts possible, but it had one big downside: it required a lot of repetition.
Cairo, on the other hand, creates verifiable transaction execution proofs with just one machine.
Both Cairo and Solidity are smart contract languages, but their functionalities and principles are distinct.
Think of them as different tools in your dev toolbox.
Cairo's popularity is skyrocketing.
The number of full-time devs increased by 875% over the past two years and by 83% YoY. It's not just for crypto - any situation requiring proof of computation can benefit from Cairo.
So, what is Cairo? 🚁
It’s the Rust-inspired, native smart contract language for Starknet.
It's the first Turing-complete language for STARK-provable programs that can be verified by any independent verifier.
Is Cairo better than Solidity? = apples to oranges 🍏🍊
Imagine Solidity as a Lego set where you can take different building blocks (crypto components) and put them together in numerous ways to create a complex lego space station (a complicated smart contract).
It's all about putting together different smaller modules to create something bigger which interacts with each other.
On the other hand, Cairo has a very unique and powerful property: it creates provable programs for general computation.
But what does that mean?
Imagine you want to check if someone has put the complex lego space station correctly together.
With Solidity, you would need to check each lego piece and its position. You basically have to redo everything.
With Cairo, you can see exactly if each step is done correctly, you just have to check the "proofs of correct execution" This makes Cairo very efficient!
Transitioning from Solidity to Cairo means understanding some key differences.
Cairo's VM uses a single-write-only memory model, and the base for all its operations are field elements, unlike the EVM which uses conventional uint256 or uint32 systems.
Remember, Cairo doesn't have the concepts of inheritance and polymorphism.
While contracts can be extended, object-oriented programming concepts require some innovative thinking.
It's important to note that Cairo smart contracts are converted into Sierra code first, which adds a security layer to avoid DoS attacks.
To sum up, Cairo isn’t better or worse than Solidity, just different.
It’s a powerful tool for devs looking to streamline their computations and work more efficiently.
As we enter the broadband moment in crypto, having options is a good thing!
To benefit from the power and scalability of STARKs, learn the open-souce language Cairo and write your programs in that way.