Original text: Cairo gets high marks from Starknet devs. Here's why.
Translation and proofreading: Starknet Chinese Community
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introduction
Over the past year, the Starknet developer experience has changed significantly, marked by the move from Cairo Zero to the more advanced, Rust-like Cairo. This evolution not only improved security and usability, but also received positive feedback from the community. A recent survey of 92 Starknet developers showed that the changes are widely welcomed.
A few statistics worth noting:
Developer Profile : 61% of Starknet developers have at least 3-5 years of development experience.
Cairo > Cairo Zero : 74% of developers prefer to use Cairo over the older version Cairo Zero.
Cairo Zero die-hard fans : 6% are still loyal fans of Cairo Zero.
Better development experience : 62% of developers said that the Starknet development experience has improved significantly in the past year.
Cairo vs. other languages : Over 70% of developers prefer Cairo or like it as much as any other language they use.
Future Tools Outlook : Future tools that developers hope to see on Starknet:
Starknet online debugger and performance analyzer
Cairo registry (similar to crates.io )
Starknet Document Generation and Registry
Before diving into the broader survey results, other changes to the development experience over the past year should also be mentioned to provide context: To support the new Cairo and Starknet infrastructure’s overall shift to Rust, many tools were written in Rust. These advances lay the foundation for a more powerful and efficient development environment.
Among them, the following are worth mentioning:
Starkli : A new super-fast CLI for interacting with Starknet
Scarb : for Cairo compilation and dependency management
Starknet Foundry : The go-to suite for developing Starknet smart contracts
Devnet-rs : Rewritten in Rust, replacing Pythonic devnet
Thanks to all the survey participants. The insights provided in the survey will help us build our roadmap for feature planning, new tools, and new features for Cairo.
Developer Statistics
First, we summarize various aspects of the survey participants, including their programming experience and experience using Cairo and Starknet.
Most participants stated that they had 3-5 years of programming experience.
The largest group of survey participants are smart contract developers, accounting for 45% of respondents. This significant proportion highlights the growing interest and reliance of developers on using Cairo to build secure and efficient smart contracts. Tool developers and researchers are Comprising the second largest group in the survey, this highlights Cairo’s versatility and its appeal at all levels of blockchain development.
The vast majority of participants (73%) are using Cairo to develop smart contracts on Starknet. The survey also highlighted the diverse applications of Cairo, with some developers using the language to prove their worth through SHARP or Stone, or for application chains. Development work.
Our survey shows that 29% of participants rely mainly on the Cairo Book to learn Cairo. Starknet documentation and the Core Stars Telegram group are next, and these resources also play an important role in the learning process of developers.
Cairo Development Tools
The developer survey also revealed which tools Cairo developers use most frequently, providing valuable information about the development ecosystem and Cairo developer workflows. This information can not only help identify trends within the community, but also guide the development of tools. Future improvements and innovations will provide better support for the work of developers.
The survey results revealed that the most popular CLI tool among Cairo developers is Starkli, with 46.7% of developers saying it is their first choice. Despite the continuous advancement of technology, some developers are still using the outdated starknet-cli tool. This continued use indicates a certain familiarity and comfort with older tools, but it also highlights the need for continued education and transition support to ensure that all developers can benefit from the latest improvements in the tools.
Most developers use a combination of Scarb and Starknet Foundry as their development framework, while 23% rely solely on Scarb for building and testing.
Forking and Fuzzing are the most commonly used features in Starknet Foundry testing. Starknet Cast scripts are less commonly used.
Unsurprisingly, Starknet.js is the most commonly used SDK by developers, followed by starknet-rs. (Over the past year, most of the Starknet stack has moved from Python to a Rust codebase.)
Both Katana and starknet-devnet-rs are used by developers, with Katana being used by more developers.
Most developers use VSCode as their development IDE, and some use Vim or Starknet Remix plugins.
Smart Contract Language
We wanted to understand how writing smart contracts in Cairo compares to writing them in other smart contract languages that developers are familiar with. Our survey showed that most developers (54%) use Cairo in addition to their work. Using Solidity. This significant overlap shows that while Cairo is gaining traction, Solidity remains a cornerstone in the developer toolbox. Comparing these languages helps us assess each language’s learning curve, efficiency, and unique Advantages.
However, more than 70% of developers say they prefer Cairo, either exclusively or in conjunction with other languages. This strong preference highlights Cairo's growing popularity and acclaim in the developer community. This shows that developers appreciate Cairo's features and functions and consider it a valuable addition to their skill sets. As more and more developers recognize the advantages of Cairo and integrate it into their own projects, or even replace other This preference also highlights the potential of Cairo to become a mainstream language in the field of smart contract development.
Starknet Development Experience
Turning our focus to the general development experience on Starknet, most participants rated it as above average. On a scale of 1 to 7, 86% of respondents rated it high. This shows the positive sentiment held by developers. This positive evaluation reflects the robustness and developer-friendliness of the Starknet ecosystem.
Most participants believe that the Starknet development experience has improved significantly over the past year. We hope that this trend will continue, driving further improvements to make the development process more streamlined and enjoyable, and attracting more developers to join the community. , will also promote more innovations and use cases.
The vast majority of developers prefer Cairo to Cairo Zero, but there are some conservative enthusiasts who still insist on using Cairo Zero.
What should we develop next?
When asked which tools should be developed next, respondents were pretty evenly distributed among the given options. This lack of strong preferences suggests that developers see value in a variety of potential tools, reflecting the different perspectives within the community. As we continue to evolve and progress, we encourage everyone to keep an eye on this area and we will work to meet these diverse needs and continue to improve the Cairo developer's toolbox.
Participants strongly expressed a desire to develop more advanced debugging capabilities for Cairo to enable more efficient and effective troubleshooting. In addition, there was a clear need for code coverage tools that could provide valuable insights into how developers Which parts of the codebase are being tested, thus ensuring the robustness and reliability of smart contracts.
The need for code coverage is also the most requested feature in Starknet Foundry, highlighting its importance in the entire development ecosystem. Meeting these requirements is critical to supporting the community and improving the overall development experience for Cairo and Starknet.
What's next?
Many components of the Starknet developer stack have undergone significant changes over the past year. The first of course is Cairo itself, which has migrated from Cairo Zero to Cairo. Compared to Cairo Zero, Cairo is more expressive and advanced. , which is safer to write, and opens up endless possibilities for developers looking to exploit validity proofs. In addition to Cairo, which draws a lot of inspiration from Rust, many tools have also been migrated from Python to Rust implementations. These tools include: Protostar (which converts replaced by Starknet Foundry), the former Pythonic devnet (to be replaced by devnet-rs), the starkli CLI, and other tools. It’s great to see that many developers think the Starknet development experience has improved over the past year. Of course, we don’t There is still a lot of work to do. In the coming year, we hope to improve in the following noteworthy areas:
Documentation and Examples : Many developers have noted that while the tool itself generally meets their needs, it is not easy to find good examples and documentation for all the features. We want to focus on improving the documentation and examples for Cairo itself, as well as for the Cairo and Starknet tools.
Cairo Language Server : More than 70% of participants use VSCode as their Cairo IDE and rely on the Cairo Language Server to provide syntax highlighting, smart code completion and other features. As one of the most commonly used tools for developers, it is used in many situations. The following represents the language itself. Many developers have pointed out that the Cairo language server currently has some bugs and the performance is not good enough. We will focus on improving the language server in the next year.
New utilities and features . There are still some necessary missing utilities to make Cairo more secure and improve the development experience. One example is code coverage in Starknet Foundry. Code coverage and other feature requests raised in this survey It will help us to arrange our priorities for next year.
We’d like to thank all of the amazing teams working on building Starknet tooling and improving the developer experience:
and everyone who contributed to the development and improvement of the Cairo tool
Click to view Starknet development tools and resources: https://www.starknet.io/developers/tools-and-resources/
