Offchain Labs has published a blog post to announce that Stylus is scheduled to go live later in 2023. Termed EVM+, Stylus is the next-generation programming environment by Arbitrum to boost the development of decentralized applications with interoperability features.
The goal is to advance a million developers to advance a billion users. It will be powered by WebAssembly smart contracts. Developers will have the power to choose their preferred language and leverage it throughout the course. For instance, some may choose C, C++, or even Rust. Other programming languages will have the support they seek for development.
A vision was earlier set of transitioning Web2 languages to Arbitrum Nova and Arbitrum One. The recent development commits to not just stand by it but accelerate it better.
It is crucial since it carries forward the performance boost of 10x that was previously set up by the Nitro Upgrade. Decentralized applications written in Stylus will indeed function faster as compared to their Solidity counterparts. The biggest benefit, however, is the interoperability since developers will no longer have to make a choice between different networks like Ethereum or any other alternative layer 1 solution.
This has been well received by the community, with one of the members saying that they look forward to seeing how it allows a protocol to support more labor and services solutions.
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The need to launch Stylus is inspired by the fact that there should be an EVM equivalence for a general-purpose roll-up technology to empower the ecosystem of decentralized applications and protocols.
Learning a single language is now expected to come in handy with no requirement to change or relearn something else. dApps writing in Stylus are interoperable irrespective of the language they have been written in. Stylus looks to make the transition to Web3 as seamless as possible.
Another great advantage is that Stylus lowers the fees further. This is expected to encourage a new era of high-compute blockchain applications. Development of decentralized gaming to be more viable with the data-saving costs in the picture. A similar benefit will be experienced by DAOs, decentralized finance, and other use cases. Stylus will be integrated into Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova to offer such high efficiency.
Once integrated, users can utilize Stylus to create their own precompiles, special smart contracts that efficiently perform a task like computing hashes.
Ethereum researchers will largely seek relief through Stylus for designing and iterating on EIP compiles without setting up their testnets.
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More details related to the launch of Stylus will be announced in the coming days on Twitter and Discord channel of Offchain Labs. While the final integration is tentatively scheduled for later this year, one can keep up with the developments through its official social media channels.
To wind up, note that Stylus is no replacement for EVM but merely something that compliments it for efficient development.
