Ethereum’s Layer 2 scaling platform StarkNet has overhauled its internal Cairo programming language to give developers access to Web3 development.
An announcement shared with Cointelegraph describes updates to Cairo 1.0, which emulates features of the popular Rust programming language. The hotfix is intended to allow developers with general programming experience to start building decentralized applications on StarkNet’s Ethereum Layer 2 network.
StarkWare co-founder and president Eli Ben-Sasson told Cointelegraph that the main reason for the Cairo revamp is to make Layer 2 development more accessible to developers of all backgrounds:
“The main drivers were security and ease of use, and doing the review presented an excellent opportunity to remove input for developers with a background in conventional languages.”
The technical specifications outlined in the January 5 release cover a number of enhancements to the Cairo language. This includes improvements to the language’s syntax and constructs, a holistic type system, intuitive libraries, streamlined code, and strong typing through a demanding specification of data types.
StarkNet highlights Sierra as the top addition to the Cairo revision, which stands for Safe Intermediate Representation. Sierra acts as a new intermediate rendering layer between Cairo 1.0 and Cairo bytecode.
As Ben Sasson explained, Sierra is an important aspect of ensuring a permissionless network. The update allows for reverse transactions to be included in StarkNet blocks, which helps the protocol avoid adding complex “crypto-economic mechanisms.”
Ben Sasson said that Sierra will allow StarkNet to “inherit Ethereum’s full censorship resistance” and primarily protects against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks from sequencers.
As Cointelegraph previously reported, Ben-Sasson pioneered ZK-STARK cryptography along with other computer scientists. Zero-Knowledge Scalable Transparent Arguments of Knowledge is a proof system that encrypts and verifies transaction data to provide security, scalability, and resilience to quantum computing.
According to StarkNet, Cairo is the fourth most popular smart contract language by total value locked. It is the foundation of applications that have processed over 300 million transactions, minted 90 million NFTs, and facilitated $790 million worth of Ethereum settled trades.
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