Julian from the Stellar Development Foundation compares Solidity and Soroban Rust SDK for smart contract development, building identical hello world contracts in both languages and highlighting Rust's advantages for blockchain including concurrency safety and lower computational overhead.
This tutorial from Julian, a senior developer advocate at the Stellar Development Foundation, provides a side-by-side comparison of smart contract development in Solidity (Ethereum) and Soroban Rust SDK (Stellar). The session walks through building identical hello world contracts in both languages, explaining syntax, function declarations, data types, and execution models. Key differences highlighted include Solidity's use of the pure keyword versus Rust's implicit immutability, string handling via encode pack in Solidity versus symbol vectors in Soroban, and parameter passing differences. Julian emphasizes Soroban's advantages: Rust's inherent concurrency safety, lower computational overhead reducing gas fees, and benefits for network node operators. The tutorial concludes with a comparison framework and references documentation for migrating from EVM to Soroban.