South Dakota, US
This week, we drove in South Dakota, from west to east, and we will leave for Iowa tomorrow. The driving roads in this state were quite boring, with flat farmland, compared to previous roads in the west, which were mostly on mountains and crossing forests. We only saw a spacial landscape called “Badlands” – an area with a bunch of small and dry hills.
There were fewer cutiepies here. We saw cows and sometimes horses, and rarely saw rabbits or squirrels. Not a lot of things happening in the countryside. Time moves slowly.
Rust blockchain projects
I read some Rust blockchain projects this week,
- Elrond:
- sc-delegation-rs user-fund-storage: exactly the same logic as Solidity contracts.
- sc-examples-rs “Smart contract examples for Elrond’s Arwen VM.”
- Near:
- Core contracts
- Near EVM I was surprised to see James is the main contributor of EVM.
- near-sdk
Rust library for writing NEAR smart contracts.
Previously known as
near-bindgen.
- Parity:
- Ink. The readme file says it is still work-in-progress and suggests better not to try.
- Aleo:
- Aleo
- snarkOS. “A Decentralized Operating System for Private Applications.”
- The Leo Programming Language I have good impressions of Aleo. Their projects have great documentation. The project itself is a ZK blockchain that seems to be worth attention. They even developed their own programming language, Leo.
NEAR run
I chose to run NEAR and started with its EVM. The EVM repo seems to keep updating, and some of the documented command lines no longer worked. I asked questions in their Discord channel and got replies fast, even though I didn’t get the exact right answer. Anyway, I ran EVM successfully and sent a PR.
NEAR gives simple smart contract examples:
https://github.com/near/near-sdk-rs/tree/master/examples/status-message
I created a NEAR testnet account, then created some contracts’ accounts, built and deployed smart contracts on the testnet, called a contract successfully, and finished the first round test run. The experience with NEAR so far was pretty good.
I like that the development guidelines are so clear that I wasn’t confused for a second. NEAR also has a lot of documentation, workshop tutorials, and Whiteboard Series with NEAR, a series of knowledge-expanding videos.
Unlike building on Ethereum with Solidity, I feel I learned things by reading how to build on NEAR.
In NEAR’s documentation, they cited Rust programming documentation in detail about how to properly deal with error handling: improving-error-handling-and-modularity.html#separation-of-concerns-for-binary-projects.
It’s a great way to start with programming smart contracts in Rust. I think programming isn’t about writing code. It’s about learning rules to behave appropriately in the code world.
Life in the countryside
The daily life in the countryside was as boring as peaceful. We were only around plants and animals (mostly bugs and flies this week). Mobile signals and internet networks were terrible, and we hardly enjoyed it.
It was still hot in South Dakota. We went out hiking or walking in the early mornings and stayed at home for the rest of the days.
Given the world is still in the pandemic, we choose to stay far away from people as possible as we can. When we started our road trip, we mostly decided to live outside of cities and stay in small towns with tiny populations.
The good thing is, nothing is in short supply. Even being far away from cities, we keep having enough fresh food, drinking alcohol and rubbing alcohol.