Aviva Directory » Computers & Internet » Programming » Solidity

Used primarily for implementing smart contracts, the Solidity programming language is statically-typed and object-oriented.

Proposed by Gavin Wood, Solidity was developed by the Solidity team of the Ethereum project, led by Christian Reitwiessner, and is the primary language on Ethereum, a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Its programs run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine and some other blockchain platforms, including Monax.

Smart contracts are programs executed inside a peer-to-peer network where no one has special authority over the execution, allowing for the implementation of tokens of value, ownership, voting, and other types of logics.

Ethereum is one of the larger blockchain platforms, sharing some similarities with Bitcoin. However, while the Bitcoin network was created as a peer-to-peer currency exchange, in which Bitcoin, as a token, was meant to be a store of value, Ethereum was created as a way for people to transfer anything of value, not just cryptocurrency. Ethereum's token, Ether, was created as a way of paying for transactions on the platform. Whereas Bitcoin was intended as an asset, Ether was intended as fuel for the network.

To overcome the difficulties of trading anything other than cryptocurrencies on the Bitcoin platform, Ethereum was created as a new system, which required a computing language with more flexibility than Bitcoin, which was written mostly in C++. Solidity was created to be the foundation of the Ethereum network.

Unlike programs created through traditional programming languages, which can be debugged, mistakes cannot be edited or fixed in Solidity. As transactions cannot be reversed, smart contracts created in Solidity have to be flawlessly coded when it comes into effect. In order to prevent technical errors, Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, introduced a tool named Solidify, which is an AI auditing system that detects and classifies smart contract risks.

Released in 2014, the programming language was influenced by C++, JavaScript, and Python. As Solidity uses a syntax similar to ECMAScript, it is familiar to many web developers.

Sponsored by the Ethereum Foundation, the programming language is an open-source, community project governed by a core team of developers, and based on GitHub.

The focus of this portion of our guide is on the Solidity programming language. Appropriate resources for this category may include websites related to the language itself, to any variants or close implementations of the language, as well as to any editors, IDEs, or tools created to facilitate programming in Solidity. User groups, forums, guides, and tutorials dedicated to Solidity may also be listed here.

 

 

Recommended Resources


Search for Solidity on Google or Bing