If you have been following me over the past week or so, you’ll have noticed that I have been talking a lot about Avalanche. Avalanche is “a heterogeneous network of blockchains” designed to be secure, fast, decentralized, efficient, cheap, and highly performant. Its target audience seems to be the financial and financial assets industry.
I have been learning how to develop on/for it over the last week or so on Figment Learn, and while it has been a great experience, I have to admit that there are a couple of ways I believe Avalanche’s developer experience could be improved.
API
The current API is limited to just two languages: Go and JavaScript — although technically AvalancheJS is just a library to interface with the Avalanche platform. This may be a little bit unfair to them as they are relatively, but it would really help their cause if they had API support — or at least libraries — in other popular languages, especially Python, Rust, and maybe even Solidity. Not too many people have the time to learn a new programming language.
Tooling
I have come across a couple of very young programming languages — such as Clarity — that have excellent tooling. Some of them have even have online REPLs to use as a playground as well as LSP extensions that can be installed on popular IDEs. This is something that is missing from Avalanche. I know you can use those from Go and/or JavaScript, but since there’ll be idiosyncrasies in how you write your code — because smart contracts — I think it would be great if Avalanche’s core team improved on especially web based and IDE tooling.
Testing Suite
This is similar to the tooling problem: Avalanche programs are not Go/JavaScript programs so they need special testing tools that would make it harder for developers to make errors when developing smart-contracts.
Conclusion
The Avalanche developer ecosystem is a very young one. What they have achieved in terms of documentation, tutorials, and community building has been very impressive. I can only hope they’ll continue to build on that to ensure we can look forward to having a great developer experience in the near future.
