StartupMuKn and global blockchain research and development company IOHK have announced a partnership to bring the Glow programming language to the Cardano blockchain.
Glow is a domain specific language which will allow anyone to write blockchain-based applications and deploy them on Cardano. Glow is initially being launched on Cardano’s Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) developer network (devnet), an environment that currently allows developers to write in Solidity (the smart contracts programming language used in Ethereum) and deploy these smart contracts for testing. Glow’s compatibility with the EVM will allow developers to write applications with a significantly smaller number of lines of code, simplifying and reducing the cost of the development process.
By broadening the number of programming languages available for writing smart contracts on Cardano, more developers will be able to take advantage of the Cardano platform’s lower fees, enhanced functionality, formally verified security and quicker speeds. Glow is also portable. While it currently works on Cardano and Ethereum, in the future it will work with other blockchains. That means that once an app is built, it can be ported and used on other platforms. So, developers will be able to choose to run their application on a blockchain based solely on its merit, rather than being limited by programming language.
“Interoperability is a key focus for IOHK,” product director for IOHK Aparna Jue said. “We believe that mainstream blockchain adoption will be driven by the industry providing broad compatibility, breaking down barriers between individual blockchains and their native programming languages, allowing a broad range of developers to onboard. This is why languages like Glow are such an important piece of the Cardano puzzle.
“Our devnet programme has allowed us to test and improve smart contract development like never before, with a variety of different languages for developers to explore. These include Plutus, which will be a language for building blockchain-based applications across a number of industries and Marlowe, a domain specific language which could be a game changer for the financial industry, underpinning a whole new global financial system”.
“Writing a DApp is the single hardest thing to do, because you can’t afford any mistakes,” MuKn cofounder Francois-Rene Tideau said. “Mistakes may mean a significant loss of user funds, with active adversaries looking for them. Existing developer tools didn’t measure up to the task of creating secure DApps in this adversarial environment, so MuKn decided to create those tools with Glow. IOHK is a great partner for us because both companies are founded on the principle of thinking in the long term rather than what only works for today. We want to build on stone, not quicksand.”
