In 2023, Solidity, Smart Contract Development & DeFi is rocketing

TL;DR - Solidity Language and interest towards DeFi is continuing to rise amongst developers as Web3 continues to be adopted

Like space shuttle at a times - Solidity Language has high targets for 2023 and beyond. Pic: not by me but Shutterstock does it better 🧐

Every year official community responsible for development of Solidity programming language creates survey where it collects valuable data directly from developers about the state of language usage. Survey for year 2022 was no different, with only difference being the amount of respondents growing over 2X from 453 for year 2021 to 1401 for 2022 🚀.

Quick 101 - What’s Solidity Language?

For those unfamiliar, if you have ever heard of Web3 or used Decentralized Finance solutions (short: DeFi) then you should have been interacting with applications and solutions built using Solidity. It’s a novel way to program so-called smart contracts which are programmatically written agreements, conditions. These agreements can be established between multiple parties. Smart contracts (agreements) are recorded on blockchain which is immutable and transparent. A good example of smart contract written in Solidity could be a loan between two parties. I won’t go more deeply into topic but if interested, this post by Rohas Nagpal summarises the concept well.

Language itself is relatively lightweight, since Remix IDE/compiler is accessible via browser.

To give you idea of “Hello World-style” contract code written in Solidity below:

pragma solidity ^0.8.17;

contract ExampleOfSolidityCode {
    string public greet = "Code is like poetry...";
}

Just input this code into Remix and run it. Can’t get that easier 😊

Structure of survey

Analysis is divided into five parts

1. Demographics

2. Developer profile

3. Solidity user profile

4. Solidity developer experience

5. Solidity developer community

Since report is many pages long, I tried to summarise by raising some highlights down below.

Outcomes - the state of .sol

Overall - looking bullish. From macro perspective ecosystem of Solidity looks bullish. Community of developers are growing with over 100 countries represented. Typically majority of developers are 3+ years of experience, having JavaScript background. Backed by Ethereum foundation, official community is making efforts to keep ecosystem thriving.

Easy to learn. Solidity is apparently relatively easy to grasp with everything between one and less than a six months.

Fast adoption of latest versions. New language means a lot of new iterations thus the fact that majority of developers are using newest iterations is a good sign from support, proactivity and security points of view.

User experience satisfaction improved. Important takeaway. Easier to use equals higher probability for mass adoption.

Troubleshooting heavily dependent on Eth StackOverFlow and Google. Really nothing much to add. Quite the same situation with any programming language 😏

User experience is divided between respondents, few highlights

Develpers loved:

• easy-to-use compiling of code

• easy readability

• language syntax is relatable to other languages such as C++, JavaScript, Typescript

• User-defined types

Developers complained on:

• gas optimization (lack of)

• missing fractional numbers

• debugging can be challenging

• bytecode size limit in contracts

Improvement suggestions for future roadmap:

• built-in EIP-support into compiler/IDE

• better error handling

• better optimization

Survey shows that community of developers appears to be strong & supportive. This is positive note expressing that developers feel to have genuine interest toward Solidity, support each other in various questions either in person or via forum or GitHub. They believe into potential of Solidity to be multifunctional language to build with most different applications for DeFi and Web3 in general.

My take - Outlook for 2023

Reading through survey outcome it’s obvious that like any programming language - Solidity has its own pros and cons. However, its obvious that it came here to stay. Judging solely by amount of respondents rising over 2x just in one year, trend is likely to stay up-north. From S-curve adoption perspective - popularity can be expected to go parabolic when Web3 technology will steadily continue to mature over next 3-5 years. According to various sources, DeFi technology is still around early adoption-stage. Rome was also not built in a day.

Solidity is quickly going mainstream and becoming de facto smart contract programming language of a choice amongst Web3 developers. Usually they are making their transition from Web2-space and want to build next-gen applications most probably on Ethereum, Polygon and deploying them on L1/L2-EVM compatible blockchains.

As of writing this (after release of GPT-4) my main concern is now - will AGI/GPT-like AI-solutions form a threat to programming culture on overall level in the future?

Considering the fact that model was trained with data up till September 2021, I think there should not be a reason to panic the model is already obsolete (but able to learn rebuild himself like terminator) - it’s a definitely something to be aware of.

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Thanks for taking your time reading the post, I hope you learned something new today! Please, consider subscribing and sharing this post with a friend!

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Now I would like to hear 🦻 from you - what’s your take on the future of Solidity? 👀

References:

Solidity Developer Survey 2022