Rediscovering the Arbitrum Stylus programming environment: Will it bring in a large number of developers from other languages into Web3?

Written by: hitesh.eth

Compiled by Frank, Foresight News

So far, Stylus may be the most noteworthy product launched by Arbitrum. It’s time for the market to realize why Stylus is significant for the entire blockchain industry.

In recent years, every user has been happy with the process of receiving airdrops just by testing the protocol. However, in recent times, more and more users have entered with high expectations, but in the end, they get nothing.

It seems to be gradually evolving into the endgame of the entire on-chain user growth story. What’s worse, developers are also leaving this false jungle woven by on-chain users because it is difficult to retain these “Farmers” after the token generation event (TGE).

The consequences of developers leaving are severe because it means you will not see any new innovations, and new projects will only blindly copy Aave, Compound, and GMX, ultimately leading to a dead end.

What is the solution then? How to motivate developers to stay and attract new developers to the Web3 field?

One straightforward way is to incentivize developers active in the Web3 developer community - there are already projects that have started airdropping tokens to developers, which is a very positive thing for the entire space.

But the second approach is a more long-term solution, that is, projects should drop the entry barrier for newbie developers - even if they are only familiar with basic languages like C or C++, they should be able to easily integrate into the Web3 development field.

Imagine, a C language developer can build DApp applications on the EVM, which is undoubtedly very cool, isn’t it?

Let’s continue the discussion on methods to lower the entry barrier for newbie developers, such as Arbitrum Stylus, which is building a Virtual Machine (VM) compatible with the C language. This VM allows developers to code in C, C++, Rust, and any language that can be pre-compiled into WASM.

Currently, they have already opened support for Rust and C languages in the initial stage.

According to statistics, there are 12 million developers worldwide who are familiar with the Rust language. So, do you know how many people understand the Solidity syntax?

Less than 100,000.

In other words, Arbitrum Stylus can tap into a large community of Rust and C developers who can start deploying applications from day one… Now, it will be effortless for these developers to deploy projects on Arbitrum.

However, Arbitrum Stylus not only allows non-Solidity developers to code and deploy DApps, but also improves execution efficiency by 10 times and increases memory expansion capabilities by 50-100 times through supporting optimized WASM binary code.

Arbitrum also adopts the Nitro fraud proof technology to verify the accuracy of the code compiled from C/Rust to WASM.

Stylus can be seen as a natural extension of Nitro’s fraud proof technology, which not only verifies the execution history but also verifies any WASM program deployed by developers.

After the emergence of Stylus, developers can use EVM to build memory-intensive applications, such as prediction models, complex generative art, and on-chain machine learning. With Stylus, artificial intelligence can also be explored on EVM with better performance.

In addition, any DApp built with Stylus can interoperate with Rust DApp, which means that DApps in the Arbitrum ecosystem can seamlessly interact with Solana.

As of the time of writing, the Arbitrum Stylus testnet has been launched, and you can use the Stylus SDK to start building DApps using C and Rust languages.

It is expected that Stylus will go live on the Mainnet in the next 3-5 months. It will be the biggest upgrade for Arbitrum, benefiting its developers and users in terms of future adoption.