Overview of 6 Major Smart Contract Languages: How to Choose for Developers?

For developers who want to enter the Web3 world, Solidity and Vyper are the best languages to explore how smart contracts work.

If you want to become a Web3 developer, you need to know how to write smart contracts, which are the backbone of all Web3 applications. Simply put, smart contracts are computer programs deployed and executed on blockchain networks that provide deterministic guarantees, enabling multiple parties to reach a consensus and produce tamper-proof results. From financial applications to gaming, people are building a plethora of novel smart contract use cases today, providing users with fairer access to financial primitives, stronger trust-minimized guarantees, and ownership of digital assets.

Most Popular Smart Contract Languages



Solidity

Solidity is the most popular blockchain programming language for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and is widely used in a range of EVM-compatible blockchains.

Advantages of Solidity

Solidity is a high-level Turing-complete language, meaning that developers can write code faster because many low-level concerns are abstracted away. Its syntax is also similar to Javascript, one of the world's most popular programming languages, making it a good starting point for developers transitioning to Web3.

Another advantage of Solidity for new smart contract developers is that it comes with built-in protections to prevent costly mistakes. As the most widely used language in Web3, Solidity developers have access to more libraries and tools, better documentation, and increased developer support in forums.

Disadvantages of Solidity

For developers with little object-oriented programming experience, Solidity's syntax can be confusing at times, and its function overloading feature is often detrimental to code readability. There are also some Solidity development practices that some developers may be unfamiliar with, such as the absence of native data types for decimals.

For advanced Web3 developers, writing code in Solidity usually results in higher gas costs compared to lower-level languages.

Vyper

Vyper is a Web3 programming language that is compatible with the EVM and is second only to Solidity in this regard. It is a contract-oriented, Python-like programming language with strong typing, small compiler code size, and efficient bytecode generation.

Advantages of Vyper

Vyper code looks and feels like Python, making it one of the best starting points for Python developers to quickly start their Web3 development journey.

Vyper also has an easy-to-understand language and compiler implementation, which helps to improve code readability and auditability, making it easier for developers to develop secure smart contracts. As the second most used smart contract programming language, Vyper has many of the same tools and resources as Solidity.

Disadvantages of Vyper

Vyper still lacks the extensive community support that Solidity has, and Vyper currently does not have native Solidity tools.

Vyper also lacks modifiers, class inheritance, and recursive calling, and the programming language is not Turing complete. Many of these missing features are designed to enhance contract security and auditability, but developers need to do extra work to address these limitations. As a newer language, Vyper is still in development, which also means that it has fewer features.

Other Languages
Solidity and Vyper are the two main giants in today's smart contract development, but there are also other emerging blockchain coding languages.

Yul

Yul is an Ethereum intermediate-level language that supports EVM.

Yul is designed to be directly translated into bytecode and is good at optimizing smart contracts and reducing gas costs for more advanced Web3 developers. Although Yul is a great learning resource, it is best suited for writing specific high-performance code. As an independent coding language, Yul currently lacks tooling and ecosystem support.

Cairo

Cairo is a Turing-complete smart contract programming language designed to create STARK-provable programs for general computations.

Cairo is primarily used for StarkNet - a layer 2 blockchain built on top of Ethereum, where program logic is transformed into a STARK proof, providing verifiable computation settlements on the Ethereum blockchain. Although Cairo is a powerful language for building fast and scalable smart contracts, its support is limited to the StarkNet/StarkEx ecosystem.

Rust

Rust is a popular programming language for smart contract development that is suitable for many non-EVM blockchains, such as Polkadot and Solana. Unlike many other languages listed here, Rust is not only suitable for Web3 development.

The Rust programming language itself is efficient, secure, and reduces unnecessary code bloat. Rust's data structures are very compact, making it ideal for blockchain space constraints. However, many blockchains do not yet have mature tools or support for Rust.

Move

Move is a smart contract programming language based on Rust, originally developed for Meta's Diem blockchain.

Move introduces a new system built on three core premises: first-class resources, higher security, and upgradable verifiability. Most notably, Move's programming language integrates resources at the type level rather than neutrally supporting any single type of token (i.e. ETH or BTC) integration. Today, Move is primarily used in the Aptos and Sui blockchains and has limited support outside of this ecosystem.

How to Choose the Best Smart Contract Programming Language

Different blockchains support different languages, which means there is no one language that fits all scenarios. If you are already familiar with a coding language, the following chart will help you choose a blockchain that supports the smart contract language you prefer.

For developers who are new to Web3 and unsure of which blockchain to build on or which language to learn, Solidity and Vyper are the best languages to explore how smart contracts work.

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