How dApp development benefits from Cartesi?
In our opinion, the most important thing that Cartesi brings to the Crypto space, more specifically to the Layer 2 blockchains table, are: decentralized computing power and the usage of Linux operating systems.
We’ve talked about these two topics briefly in previous articles. In this one, we’re going to dive a bit more into the benefits of using a Linux operating system, because we think this is a quite unique and powerful feature.
Linux Operating System
For those who don’t have a technologic background, may not have heard about Linux operating systems and why are so important in computer science in the last decades.
Average personal computer users have experience using commercial operating systems such as Windows or Mac OS X, but not so many with open source ones like Linux. Though Linux have very good user interfaces, are not as polished as the commercial ones, but the power of Linux is not on the desktop software, but on Internet servers and developers workstations.
More than 95% of the servers run on Linux (yes 95%), 100% of the top 500 supercomputers run on Linux, and more than 50% developers use Linux as a platform.
So, with that astonishing stats, Linux has the most vibrant ecosystem in terms of development and system tools than any other platform (databases, web servers, proxies, programming languages, libraries, security tools, etc.).
In brief, Linux, as of today, is one of the most important pieces of software in computer engineering.
Development Tooling
As we mentioned before, Linux has the more vibrant ecosystem in terms of computer engineering tooling. The tools list is just huge, to name just a few of the most important categories we can think of now:
- Servers of all kinds (web servers, proxies, authentication, containerization, cloud, message queues, repositories, etc.)
- Databases from relational to non-relational to graph oriented to time series to realtime
- Devops tooling for continuous integration and deployment
- Network, security and forensics tooling
- Programming languages and libraries for every engineering field (math, artifical inteligence, big data, web development, authentication, distributed systems, and so on…)
The majority of information systems today are built with Linux tools and by engineers that use Linux tools in their day to day jobs. With all that in mind, you may wonder what Linux could mean to Dapp (decentralizaed apps, aka Web 3) development.
Today most of the blockchain pure development lives inside Smart Contracts developed with programming languages such as Solidity or Rust, and though the ecosystem is starting to grow rapidly, is yet quite apart from the capabilities of other computer engineering fields such as Web2 app development.
Now, this broad and diverse tooling is brought by Cartesi to the Web3 dapp development, providing a lot of benefits to the blockchain ecosystem. We enumerate just a few of those benefits:
Development tools reutilization
Developers can use the best tools to create dApps:
- programming languages (Python, Javascript, Rust, Go, C/C++, Java, Ruby, Erlang, R, MathLab, etc.)
- programming libraries (dedicated to AI, Business Analytics, Databases, Robotics, etc.)
- databases (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Firebase, Couchbase, Cassandra, MariaDB, etc.)
- communication (REST, GraphQL, RPC, sockets, event messaging, etc.)
- cloud containerization and virtualizacion (Docker, Kubernetes, LXC, LXD, Ansible, Puppet, etc.)
Developer adoption
Nowadays, it’s hard for companies and projects to find software engineers to develop and maintain apps due to different factors. Blockchain ecosystem is no different in those terms (and more even because being the new kid on the block), and as an emerging technology is key to increase developers adoption due to they are the mind and the muscle that creates the utility in the space.
Being able to use a variety of tools from the Linux ecosystem, is great to attract software engineers for the following reasons:
- Having already the knowledge to use existing tools
- No need to reinvent the wheel (already developed tools)
- No steep learning curves
- Smaller time frames for developers from other sectors to adapt to blockchain projects / teams (for example from web 2 to web 3)
- More software engineers available inmediately
- Easier and faster to onboard new members to engineering teams
Development possibilities
As developers have more tools available of almost any kind and that they already know, these improve their development environments, so they are able to:
- Develop things that were not possible before
- Prototype and develop ideas faster
- Share with developers community and benefit from contributions
- Integrate with other non blockchain systems easily
- Create systems with different software architecture aproaches
TL;DR;
As you may have read (or not, if you just jumped to this section) the usage of Cartesi has sustantial development benefits over other blockchain technologies, that make this project kind of special.
Cartesi main approach is to bring the power and versatility of Linux to the blockchain world, giving developers well known, powerful and battle tested tools that open new doors of possibilities in crypto development.
If you want to know more about Cartesi visit their website and our previous articles that cover some important things about the project.
