Deep technical overview of Soroban's architecture, covering the host-guest boundary design, value types, host functions, contract storage, and resource metering that enable secure, performant smart contract execution on Stellar.
This presentation provides a comprehensive technical walkthrough of Soroban's internal architecture and design philosophy. The speaker explains how Soroban extends StellarCore as a Turing-complete execution environment while maintaining security, interoperability, and performance. Key topics include the host-guest split design (host environment providing features like storage and crypto functions, guest running a WebAssembly interpreter), 64-bit polymorphic value types with optimizations for small values, host objects for complex data structures, host functions as reusable shareable functionality, contract storage via ledger footprints, and comprehensive resource metering for CPU and memory. The presentation concludes with a detailed walkthrough of a simple power contract execution, demonstrating how data flows between the contract, host, and ledger while maintaining the lean design principle of minimal code size.