With the development of technology and open source, based on the existing mainstream public chain, developers in the blockchain industry have already made efforts in the application layer. As a new world to build, existing programming languages and developer tools are not so "handy".
Voyage Project is a blockchain programming language and developer tool developed based on Scala. Its purpose is to make DApp development and smart contract writing on Ethereum, EOS, quantum chain or other public chains easier, more efficient and safer .
As a developer, the most ideal programming language needs to meet:One is easy to use and has versatility; the other is security.
However, the status quo is not the case. Existing smart contracts have many security loopholes, and programming languages cannot find a balance between complexity and security.
There have been many hacking incidents in the history of the blockchain. For example, in May 2016, due to defects in the Ethereum smart contract, The DAO, which became the highest crowdfunding case in history with US$150 million, was hacked and lost 3.6 million ether coins .
Based on the characteristics of the blockchain, all users can see the smart contract. Once the developer is negligent or poorly tested, the smart contract code will be fragile and vulnerable to attacks, and the design reliability of developer tools and programming languages is the basis for the ecological development of the blockchain.
At present, Ethereum's native programming language Solidity has high complexity and high risk. EOS and others advocate using C++ to write. Although the threshold is lowered, the C++ language itself is not designed for the blockchain, which also makes development difficult.
Based on the above pain points, the Voyage team is developing a new programming language and developer tools, hoping to become the most convenient bridge for smart contracts and building developer tools. 36Kr conducted an interview with Winston, one of its founders.
Specifically, Winston believes that the next stage of the blockchain will be the time for the landing and development of decentralized applications, and the following pain points restrict the birth of the Killer DApp:
Low TPS: Under the performance of underlying public chain transactions, it cannot meet the throughput requirements of DApps. If the transaction frequency increases, it will be severely blocked;
Complicated deployment: DApp users must download and install blockchain light clients or nodes, at this time users run on the website interface (via browser or program packaging). For ordinary users, such a complex deployment will seriously damage the usability of DApp.
Complex programming: DApp developers need to master at least three different programming languages (HTML/CSS/JS) and a large number of rapidly developing complex frameworks.
Imperfect development: The development of DApps is still in its infancy, and most of them are relatively simple in terms of underlying technology and business logic.
Therefore, Voyage hopes to become the basic programming language and developer tool to solve these problems.
Voyage is a Scala-based full-stack development language combined with Solidity. Scala is a modern multi-paradigm programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and safe manner.
Voyage has its own complete cross-platform toolchain, with two compilers, an interpreter and a linker, and does not depend on any third-party libraries, except for the Rebol2 interpreter that is required at the boot stage. Once complete, Voyage will be fully self-hosted.
Winston said that the Voyage Project is Born for DApp. Voyage integrates different underlying public chains to build a cross-blockchain and cross-platform DApp development solution.
Based on Voyage and the Voyage chain, developers can build DApps more easily, which can run on or other underlying public chains without having to master the underlying public chain structure or programming language. The Voyage tool chain will gradually expand to different underlying open source areas in blockchain services.
Voyage will make DApp development more humane. For light DApps that do not need to occupy too much computing power of EOS and cannot afford the cost of DPoS computing power, the supplementary computing power support provided by Voyage toolchain is also a clever way design.
Winston revealed that Voyage's Beta 1.0 version will be launched in Q3 of 2018. At the same time, Voyage has reached cooperation with some developer teams. For example, Voyage's decentralized homestay travel Dapp will be launched in 2019.
The address of Voyage's official website and white paper is as follows: www.voyageproject.io.
