Chad Ostrovsky from AhaLabs discusses smart contract developer tooling for Soroban, comparing Rust-based development approaches across Near, Soroban, and Cosmwasm. He explains Rain, an ABI system and interactive documentation tool, and explores the philosophy behind Soroban's no-std constraint and performance optimization.
In this Tech Talks episode, Tomer from Stellar Development Foundation interviews Chad Ostrovsky, co-founder of AhaLabs, about smart contract developer tooling. Chad shares his journey from Near Ink to building AhaLabs, and introduces Rain, a tool that embeds ABIs directly into WebAssembly contracts for better developer experience. The discussion covers key differences between Near and Soroban: Soroban's no-std requirement keeps contracts small and efficient, while Near allows standard library usage but requires asynchronous cross-contract calls. Chad advocates for Rust as the right language for financial smart contracts due to its safety guarantees, and discusses the vision of creating conventions and frameworks for decentralized app development, similar to Ruby on Rails. The conversation touches on atomicity, contract size optimization, and the future of cross-chain developer tooling.