Solidity vs Clarity vs Move: The War of Smart Contract Programming Languages

Bitcoin was invented to replace banks and the lengthy banking process. But to everybody's surprise, the underlying blockchain technology that powered the bitcoin functionalities became even more popular. Blockchain technology has revolutionized almost any intermediary. Following the successful implementation of a disruptive trend, the blockchain circle came up with a new concept called smart contracts. They elevated decentralization to the next level by leveraging the inbuilt ability to execute the agreed contracts without human intervention. The biggest advantage of smart contracts is that it has complete transparency and it can't be altered without the two parties' notice. The agreement between the buyer and the seller is directly written into lines of code, making smart contracts trustworthy. However, to add the clause and demands of the parties, the smart contract should be open to adding the aspects. Therefore, professionals use smart contract programming languages to add to the demands of the parties in the block. Although famous programming languages like C++, Java, Python, Go, Ruby, JavaScript, etc are seen as top programming languages, other specifically designed languages like Solidity, Move, and Clarity steals the stage when it comes to smart contracts.

There is a heavy debate between the smart contract programming languages. Even though all three languages mentioned above are highly adopted by blockchain professionals, there is still unsettling sand over Solidity vs Clarity vs Move and its supremacy. The following differentiation will help you understand Solidiry, Clarity, and Move and will enable you to pick the programming language that best suits your demands.

The battle of smart contract programming languages

Language is a crucial component of human communication. But when machines communicate, they use a different pattern called programming languages to convey their needs to the hardware or software programs. Similarly, smart contracts also require easy programming languages to streamline their operations. Smart contract programming languages provide easy interaction and utilize the blockchain to its full extent.

There are over thousands of smart contract programming languages available in the market today. Unfortunately, the availability of so many programming languages creates nothing but chaos and bad choice. Therefore, we have listed three top smart contract programming languages and provided a complete outlook on every one of them.

Solidity

Solidity is a programming language that is specifically designed to develop Ethereum smart contracts. But to work on Solidity, you should be both experienced and proficient in the field of Javascript technology. Solidity is a high-level, human-readable code that breaks it down into specific instructions that are easily understandable for machines. The programming language comes with a handful of benefits. Some of them are listed as follows,

• Providing inheritance properties in contracts is not a common thing. However, Solidity breaks the ice by leveraging inheritance properties in contracts including multiple level inheritance properties.
• In order to ease representation and arrangements, solidity keeps the contract open for multiple members. Therefore, many can view and clarify doubts related to the contract.
• Even developers who are not experienced with Solidity can adopt the concept if they are well-versed in JavaScript and C++. Remarkably, Solidity's blockchain development basics coordinate with that of these familiar programming languages.
• Solidity helps develop a secure, easy, and reliable medium for various sources which have the involvement of two parties to do an agreement on something.

Clarity

Clarity is a smart contract programming language introduced by Blockstack for their very own Stacks blockchain. Blockstack, a powerful platform that is aiming to build its own internet, provides smart contract facilities. Clarity is a decidable programming language used in Blockstack, which is designed as a 'non-turning complete' and 'not intended to compile.' The programming language avoids all the issues of turning complete programming language.

• With the help of its turning incompleteness, Clarity is able to calculate the transaction fee well in advance and this will be conveyed to users as well.
• Clarity can analyze the side effects of contracts and in particular, transactions. This helps improve the user experience and allows users to gain credibility.
• At Clarity, the contract source code itself is published and executed by blockchain nodes, removing any intermediate, compiled representation.

Move

Built to support digital asset creation, Move is an open-source programming language. The move is used to preserve simplicity while supporting the complex needs of a global financial infrastructure by striking a balance between the expressivity of the source language and safety measures. It is a stack-based language that works similar to all the other languages by pushing and pop; ping as operations are prepared. Based on Rust, Move aims to develop customizable transaction logic and smart contracts for the Libra digital currency.

• Move encodes ownership of the digital assets and creates procedures for the transfer of those assets.
• Move even addresses the problems of indirect representation by introducing resources, a customizable type inspired by linear logic.
• Besides, every single Libra transaction has a Move transaction script that is responsible for encoding the logic a validatory should perform on the client's behalf.