fromMedium, Original Author: Offchain Labs

Odaily Translator |

Odaily Translator |

On February 7, Offchain Labs, the Arbitrum development team, announced that it will launch the next-generation programming environment Stylus for Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova later this year. Stylus allows developers to use their familiar programming languages ​​(including Rust, C and C++) to deploy applications to run with EVM programs on Arbitrum.What's more, Offchain Labs says Stylus is an order of magnitude faster, cuts fees and is fully interoperable with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, even calling it an. Can Stylus really surpass EVM? Next, let Odaily take everyone to analyze together.

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Stylus: Beyond EVM equivalence

With the launch of the mainnet in August 2021, Arbitrum One becomes the only EVM equivalent Rollup with a valid fraud proof, which means that anything that could be done on Layer 1 in the past can now be done safely on Layer 2, and Faster and cheaper. EVM equivalence is required for any general-purpose Rollup technology and enables a more vibrant ecosystem of decentralized applications and protocols on Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova.

For users who use Stylus, it will be very convenient to deploy programs written in popular programming languages—such as Rust, C, C++, etc.—to Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova, and it can also be integrated with the Arbitrum blockchain existing Solidity dApps in parallel.

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Above: A program written in the Rust voice

From game development to social media, Stylus can make it easier to upgrade operations during the transition to Web3. Developers don't even need to understand the principles of the Solidity programming language to build on Arbitrum, or use the tools they already know and love. , regardless of the encoding preferences of these tools.

This is because programs written in different languages ​​can be seamlessly combined, and the contract never has to know what language another person uses, let alone the user—so, everything speaks for itself.

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Faster Dapps, Lower Fees

Stylus not only expands the way people write decentralized programs, but also optimizes performance and makes program processing faster. Arbitrum has seen a 10x performance improvement with last year's Nitro upgrade. With Stylus, performance will be further improved. Stylus is almost an order of magnitude faster than Arbitrum dapps written in languages ​​like Rust, or programs developed in Solidity and Vyper.

Stylus can also significantly reduce handling fees and open a new era of blockchain high computing power applications in a wide range of fields. When combined with Arbitrum Nova's data saving cost, decentralized games built on Stylus will be able to be effectively supported, DeFi, DAO and other encryption use cases will also be efficiently served on Arbitrum One, because Stylus is fully Integrate into two blockchains, Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova.

Low-cost computing can bring powerful programming freedom to developers, which is why the Ethereum community has been working on accelerating the EVM, mainly involving:

1. Occasionally add special smart contracts, called precompilation;

With Stylus, users will be able to create their own precompiles:

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AC precompiled

For Ethereum researchers, Stylus's AC precompilation function will be very valuable, because they can use Stylus to design and iterate EIP precompilation without having to build their own testnet. I believe EVM will be very happy to see Arbitrum in its development. key role in the. Many of Arbitrum's groundbreaking breakthroughs also align with eWASM, a Layer 1 initiative that adds WASM to the EVM.

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how to run

In August 2022, the Nitro upgrade changed Layer 2.

Arbitrum validators started running Geth, Ethereum's most popular execution client, and validating individual fraud in WebAssembly. For the first time ever, Layer 2 was able to run at the speed of the native blockchain, occasionally switching to the slower WASM, perhaps just to prove that it was time to defeat a potential attacker (which is rarely seen after the merger).

Stylus is the next step in the natural evolution of Arbitrum. With Nitro, Arbitrum's fraud proofs can enforce a trusted WASM where validators must agree that Geth is an honest program and that it behaves appropriately. While this is a sufficient foundation for a permissionless EVM network, which is what Ethereum and all Geth-based Layer 2s are currently doing, achieving scale requires a next step: proving fraud against untrusted WASM.

In the Stylus model, users compile their programs into WASM, which is then converted on-chain to an execution-restricted and security-enforced format. Through the WASM sandbox, Arbitrum can run user programs at a speed close to the native blockchain, and with the same security guarantees that web browsers rely on to render web pages, malicious programs will be "provable on the chain without calling the EVM". " terminated.

When a transaction calls an EVM contract, Geth executes and returns the result. If that EVM contract happens to make a subcall to a WASM program, then Stylus steps in and computes that part of the result.The EVM is still there and will be exactly the same as before.

Stylus does not replace the EVM, it enhances it.