Solidity v. Rust: Which Smart Contract Programming Language Should You Learn?

Smart contracts demonstrated the potential of blockchain technology to a massive audience. 

Not surprisingly, the emergence of this new technology brought smart contract programming languages to the forefront, with two coding languages in the middle of every conversation: Solidity and Rust.

Smart contract programming languages lay out the rules that convert text and number strings into code ready to be read by machines. 

In essence, they enable computers to understand and execute instructions that are programmed by humans.

Solidity and Rust are undoubtedly the most commonly-used smart contract programming languages in the crypto and web3 space – both of which are essential for you to know if you want to get into the highly-paid world of smart contract development. 

That's not a stretch, considering how Solidity developers and Rust developers are in short supply in the job market and, therefore, can command six-figure salaries from the get-go.

And unlike Solidity, Rust isn't restricted to the crypto trading world–it's also found some relevant use in the financial world as it grows in popularity.

Let's take a closer look at Solidity and Rust to determine which smart contract programming language is the best for you to start your journey as a web developer.

The Lowdown on Rust: The Leading Solana Smart Contract Programming Language

Rust is a statically-typed, low-level, and multiparadigm programming language developed for high safety and performance, particularly when it comes to memory management, enabling web developers to create fast, robust, feature-rich applications.

Rust shares a syntax similar to JavaScript and C++, giving developers who have a good understanding of their concepts a definite advantage. 

Its low-level nature means it has similar architecture to a computer's processor, making it easy to write high-performance and machine-efficient code.

Rust was first developed originally by Mozilla Research as an open-source project. However, in 2021, the Rust Foundation took over the reins of the programming language and its development moving forward.

Moreover, Rust has been voted as the most-loved programming language for six consecutive years since 2016 and counting, as evidenced by the Stack Overflow Developer Survey–which is indicative of the massive traction Rust has been gaining over the past several years.

Rust has enjoyed widespread use, particularly in creating web3 dapps on the Solana blockchain, among other blockchains that support the programming language.

Rust and Solana: How Do They Interact?

Solana is an open-source blockchain that supports the development of smart contracts on the blockchain. 

These are programs deployed on the Solana blockchain, which markets itself as the "world's fastest blockchain" that can purportedly support as much as 50,000 transactions per second.

While Solana allows devs to build using C and C++, the blockchain primarily uses Rust as its main programming language. However, unlike Solidity – which was created specifically for the Ethereum network – Rust has been around longer than Solana has. Due to its high performance and robust features, Rust was chosen as Solana's programming language.

Moreover, it's easy to develop Solana contracts and dapps using Rust – Solana developers only need to use an RPC provider to get started.

What Other Blockchains Support Rust as a Programming Language?

Rust doesn't begin and end with Solana. A variety of blockchains support Rust or other programming languages based on it as a programming language. Here are some examples:

• Elrond. Elrond is a blockchain and scalability platform that markets itself as a fast and efficient ecosystem for smart contract development that can handle high transaction volumes.
• Aptos. Aptos is a highly-touted layer one smart contract platform based on a smart contract platform derived from Rust, known as Move.
• Near Protocol. Near Protocol is a public proof-of-stake blockchain that supports smart contracts written in Rust, itself being written in Rust.
• Sui. Sui touts itself as a permissionless blockchain enabling developers and creators to build web3 dapps. Sui uses Move, a programming language based on Rust.

Other blockchains such as Ethereum, Cardano, Nervos, and Ankr enable support for Rust, despite running on different programming languages.

More and more developers are learning Rust because of its speed, scalability, high performance, and its penchant for nipping bugs in the bud before they begin slowing down the system – making it a perfect programming language for crypto and web3. That's not to mention its technical sophistication, making it more likely to attract top-drawer professional developers.

Metacrafters is here to help them learn as quickly as possible while also earning along the way! 

The Lowdown on Solidity: The Programming Language for Ethereum

Solidity, on the other hand, is a statically-typed, high-level, and object-oriented programming language intended specifically for the Ethereum network. 

Solidity was first developed in 2014 for implementing smart contracts on Ethereum, first proposed in 2014 and developed by Ethereum's Solidity team. Hundreds of thousands of 

Solidity developers use the programming language to create blockchain-based services for an ever-increasing number of use cases.

Like Rust, Solidity has some similarities with JavaScript, making prior knowledge a distinct advantage. Solidity is an object-oriented language, meaning it's a programming language more focused on software development, data structures, and objects rather than functions and logic.

Additionally, since Solidity is a high-level programming language, it makes it more user-friendly by being computer hardware-independent.

Solidity was developed to run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), a runtime environment that functions like a virtual machine to run software programs called "smart contracts," which are programs written in Solidity.

Which Blockchains Support Solidity?

Solidity is supported by more blockchains than just Ethereum, such as the following:

• Polygon. Polygon is a layer 2 Ethereum sidechain that allows Ethereum devs to create dapps with scalability and low gas fees.
• Arbitrum. Arbitrum is yet another layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum whose goal is to reduce congestion and gas fees by moving Ethereum computing resources off-chain.
• Optimism. Optimism is a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, offering speed and stability as a minimalist, Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible extension that uses optimistic rollups to solve network congestion and reduce gas fees.
• Polkadot. Polkadot is a public blockchain focused on interoperability, using parachains to enable interaction with different blockchains. The leading implementation for Polkadot is Rust using the Substrate software development kit, but Solidity is supported.
• Avalanche. Avalanche is a layer 1 smart contract platform developed specifically to solve the blockchain trilemma. Avalanche fully supports dapps written in Solidity.

Now that we have a better understanding of what Rust and Solidity are let's take a look at their similarities, differences, advantages, and disadvantages in the following sections.

How are Solidity and Rust similar?

Solidity and Rust share two main similarities: namely, their compatibility across multiple chains and their being Turing-complete.

1. Multichain Compatibility

Solidity, although developed specifically for Ethereum, supports a variety of sidechains, layer 2 blockchains, modular blockchains, and Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible layer one smart contract platforms like Avalanche and Polkadot, just to name a few.

Likewise, Rust supports a wide array of blockchains besides Solana. This includes Near, Polkadot, Aptos, and Sui, all of which are compatible with Move. 

Move is a programming language based on Rust, created by Facebook to enable the development of customizable transaction logic and smart contract development. Moreover, Polkadot supports different types of Rust implementation, but the most well-known one is Substrate–the primary blockchain SDK for the Polkadot ecosystem.

2. Turing-Complete

Turing-complete languages are programming languages that can solve any computational problem regardless of how complex they might be. Rust and Solidity are Turing-complete, which makes them ideal programming languages for implementing smart contract logic.

How are Solidity and Rust Different From Each Other?

Solidity and Rust possess key differences: mainly that Solidity is an object-oriented and high-level language, while Rust is a multiparadigm, low-level language. Let's take a closer look at their main differences below.

1. Solidity: High-level; Rust: Low-level

Solidity is a high-level language, which means it enables the development of programs in a much more user-friendly programming context – meaning it has high abstraction from the computer's details. This makes Solidity easier to learn and use.

On the other hand, Rust is a low-level language, which is the opposite. Low-level languages provide little to no abstraction from a computer's architecture, making it structurally similar to the processor's instructions. The advantage here is that Rust offers superior memory efficiency and processing speed, making it more machine-oriented than Solidity.

2. Solidity: Object-oriented language; Rust: Multiparadigm language

Programming paradigms refer to the approaches used to solve a computational problem. For instance, Solidity is object-oriented, meaning it implements objects and their related procedures within the context of programming to create software programs.

Meanwhile, Rust is multiparadigm, meaning it allows the use of various paradigms to solve computational problems. This means it can support approaches that are object-oriented, imperative, and functional, to name a few examples.

What are the advantages of using Rust to build dapps as opposed to Solidity?

Rust has two clear-cut benefits of building web3 dapps with it instead of Solidity. Namely, Rust's fast processing speeds and memory-safety properties, which enables safe development for engineers and providing more robust, high-performance apps for users.

1. Rust is memory-safe

In essence, memory safety is a feature in some programming languages that provide built-in prevention for programmers to make certain types of errors related to memory when dealing with memory access. This may include buffer overflows and dangling pointers, for instance. Rust is memory-safe through tracking ownership of values and using a borrow checker which manages how and what data is used.

Therefore, Rust eliminates memory-related bugs through its compiler, which prevents memory-unsafe code unless explicitly marked as such in an unsafe block or function during compile time. Ultimately, this makes Rust more memory-efficient than Solidity.

2. Rust is faster and offers better performance

Rust enables the creation of dapps with superior throughput and performance, making it perfect for creating scalable dapps. Rust works faster and better because it can be memory-safe without having to rely on traditional garbage collection technique.

What are the disadvantages of building dapps with Rust as opposed to Solidity?

Rust has two key disadvantages when it comes to building web3 dapps compared to Solidity. Namely, Rust's compiler is slower and the programming language itself is, all things being equal, harder to learn than Solidity.

1. Rust takes longer to compile

Rust is slower to compile. After all, Rust has always been marketed as a systems programming language, therefore using low-level virtual machine to write code, and taking a more substantial amount of time to regenerate machine code during compilation. For added context: C++ is probably the closest competitor to Rust in terms of what they do, and it's takes longer to compile on it as well.

2. Rust is harder to learn

Rust is largely different in form and function than other smart contract programming languages, making it a bit harder to learn. It can be a daunting task to familiarize yourself with its ownership and borrowing system as a complete beginner. Moreover, programs built with Rust tend to be harder to imitate, since you need to build out your codebase from zero.

What are the advantages of using Solidity to build dapps as opposed to Rust?

Solidity has two clear-cut benefits when it comes to building apps and developing smart contracts: it's easier to learn Solidity, and there are much more developer tools and resources for Solidity.

1. Solidity is relatively easy to learn

Given that Solidity is a high-level language, which makes its code digestible and understandable to human eyes, aspiring web3 devs with no prior experience will find learning Solidity much easier than Rust. Moreover, since its syntax shares similarities JavaScript, devs with previous JavaScript experience will take to learning Solidity easier.

2. Solidity offers a variety of dev tools

Solidity offers a wide array of fantastic developer tools. Solidity is supported by OpenZeppelin, giving Solidity developers access to open-source libraries for fast and secure smart contract development. Another instance is Solidity has plenty of JS libraries on offer, one. For instance, we have the Web3 JS library, which allows practically anyone to start building on Solidity right away.

Moreover, Solidity offers development environments like Remix IDE and Hardhat, which make building dapps easy for web3 devs.

What are the disadvantages of building web3 dapps with Solidity as opposed to Rust?

Likewise, Solidity has its tradeoffs when it comes to building web3 dapps compared to Rust. In particular, two key characteristics make building dapps on Solidity a bit difficult for devs: its integer overflows and underflows, as well as the difficulty with which static analysis – or the process of troubleshooting code without executing it – is performed.

1. Integer Overflows and Underflows on Solidity

Integer overflows happen when a number exceeds the amount than the maximum value the data type can store. The integer underflow, on the other hand, happens when a number is smaller than the minimum value the data type can store. This is a known issue in Solidity versions earlier than Solidity 0.8.

2. Difficulty in Performing Static Analysis

As we said earlier, static analysis refers to the process of analyzing and troubleshooting code without executing it. Static analysis tends to be harder on Solidity because of its Turing-completeness, giving the code a variety of potential outcomes.

The Final Word: Should I Choose Solidity or Rust?

Rust and Solidity are ultimately developed to support scalable dapps and develop smart contracts. Which one should you choose? It's all a matter of your preferences and which blockchain you wish to build on. If your main goal is to get into smart contract development right now, then Solidity would be a good place to start.

On the other hand, if you plan to learn a new, full-featured language and apply it to smart contracts and dapps, you can't go wrong with Rust.

Solidity's scope is restricted to building dapps and writing smart contracts on the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and severely lacking plenty of things that a full-fledged programming language has. For instance, there isn't enumerable mapping or generics on Solidity, nor can you do parallel programming on Ethereum with Solidity. Rust and Solana, on the other hand, is capable of doing so – which is something Solidity simply cannot do.

Granted, Rust you might have a harder go at Rust if you haven't used C++ and its features, but one thing is for sure: your Rust skills will NOT get outdated anytime soon.

Rust has been here before smart contracts were a thing, and it will still be here long after they are gone.

‍