When would JavaScript and other programming languages be supported for smart contracts on Stellar?

[johnnynanjiang]

Any short term or long term plans for adding more programming languages to Stellar smart contracts?

IMHO, more languages (that can be compiled into WASM) would open the door for more builders for Stellar.

[leighmcculloch]

There is https://github.com/Soneso/as-soroban-sdk, an sdk for AssemblyScript, which is similar to TypeScript.

[johnnynanjiang]

Thanks @leighmcculloch , that is very helpful!

[tupui]

There was recently a proposal to have a JavaScript SDK as well. I personally voted no.

I don't think it's a good idea to offer anything else than Rust. My view is that Rust is not that niche that it's a blocker for Smart Contracts. Doing so would dilute the community. Because no, devs are territorial with languages. If we do this, you will split the dev power, it will be horrible experience as realistically it will be hard to keep the feature parity.

Rust is hard, yes. For Stellar smart contract though, not that much as it's mostly using the SDK. Going to another language won't really simplify things since you will have to use the same exact concepts just with a slightly different syntax. I learned Rust with the docs, it's really not a big effort at all if you are building something real and plan on maintaining it. It's even a good because it forces you to go through the docs if you don't know Rust.

I am saying this as someone who made a POC to write contracts in Python as this is my personal favourite. Beautiful, but I won't share the code for these reasons.

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I am willing to die on the hill that Writing smart contracts must be something very conscious and done with extreme care. I am going to make a parallel with people wanting to write a smart contract with LLM as it lowers the barrier of entry. I think this is wrong and dangerous from a security point of view. There are already exploit on code crafted by skilled folks, I let you imagine what it could be now with AI. Because no, besides the top 1% of devs who use assistants to elevate their skills, that top 1% on X saying this is incredible, the rest just play with prompts and have no clue what they are doing. I've seen hundreds of devs now in our community do just this. It's horrible and I hate that we try to push this more for the hype. People are going to tell me that it's for a POC, yes but we know what happens with POC when they get funding. The POC ends up on prod.

[0xGeorgii]

Fully agree — Rust should remain the only supported language for Stellar smart contracts. It’s already the de facto choice for non-EVM ecosystems thanks to its performance, safety, and mature tooling. The strong ecosystem of cryptography, zk, fhe libraries makes it especially well-suited for blockchain development.

If there’s any language worth watching as an alternative, it’s Zig — simple, fast, and designed for safety without a runtime. But Zig is still young, with a small ecosystem and even fewer developers than Rust. For now, sticking to Rust ensures security, consistency, and community focus.

[leighmcculloch]

I don't think there's much harm in experimenting with building sdks in other languages and if anyone wants to do that, go for it. There's no tooling I'm aware of that'd prevent anyone building their own sdk.

I've experimented with a zig sdk in the past but I didn't go all the way.

The hard part of making an sdk is supporting testing. The Rust sdk embeds the actual soroban environment to create a great testing experience. I think that is harder to replicate in other languages.