Notes

Solidity Review

I took Solidity for a test drive a few months back to try to understand the hype behind it, ethereum, and the crypto space in general. While I’m no expert and I haven’t been keeping up with later developments, I did have a few thoughts on the design of the language.

• Setting a version at the top of Solidity source code seems like a nice idea and should help with making sure the language spec stays flexible enough for rapid iteration. However, the lack of a fully formed dependency management system is a bigger flaw than a nice language version management system.
• The fact that all functions default to public visibility rather than a safer alternative like internal, private, or requiring an explicit visibility seems dangerous to me, especially given the “contract” goals of Solidity.
• The overall syntax seems to borrow from several languages but most heavily from javascript, java, and python. It is nevertheless still quite clean and intuitive.
• The stdlib is still quite small and mostly consists of ethereum-specific logic and some mathematical functions. Of course, Solidity isn’t meant to be a general purpose programming language so it doesn’t need much more.
• The lack of testing frameworks on Solidity (and the minimal testing of Solidity itself) really scares me.
• There seem to be multiple bindings for other languages to call Solidity functions. This sounds like a nice idea, but they seem to be written as wrappers. Is there benefit here from having other more popular languages running Ethereum operations natively instead of wrapping Solidity?