First impressions of Rust smart contracts with Substrate and Ink, part 1
I am on a slow journey to learn about smart contract programming in Rust.
Today I am going to finally dip into ink, a framework for writing
smart contracts for blockchains built on Parity’s Substrate framework,
which includes the recently-launched Polkadot network.
I have previously written impressions of other blockchains, and their smart contract programming experiences: NEAR, Nervos, Ethereum.
My process for these first impressions reports is to come to the docs as a naive new developer, which I usually am, and write down all my thoughts as I get lost and make mistakes. I hope that this informs the product devs and documentarians about what can be improved, helps other newbies running into the same problems as me, and reinforces in myself what I’ve learned.
In this case, I got pretty far into the weeds and did quite a lot that ended up being kinda irrelevant to my end goal of writing a smart contract with Ink. Along the way I took a few detours to see what ink and the substrate tooling is doing under the hood. To keep this post from being utterly overwhelming I have broken it into three posts:
- Part 1 (this post): Wandering around the Polkadot docs
- Part 2: Building a blockchain with Substrate
- Part 3: Creating a contract with Ink and running it on the Canvas network
Ultimately, someone that is primarily interested in learning Ink contract development could have jumped straight to part 3. Someone lost like me though, might follow a similarly wandering path to arrive there.
Thanks a bunch to Hero Bird, who encouraged me, provided guidance, and answered questions.
In this post
- About Parity, Polkadot, Substrate, and Ink
- What’s my goal?
- The starting point
- Reading the Polkadot docs
- Reading the Polkadot Builder’s Portal
- So you want to build a smart contract
About Parity, Polkadot, Substrate, and Ink
Parity is one of the longest-running blockchain companies. Created by Ethereum experts, they implemented the main alternative Ethereum implementation, OpenEthereum. With that experience, they moved on to create Polkadot, a proof-of-stake sharded blockchain, that is in many ways similar to Ethereum 2, while also making several different design choices.
Importantly, Polkadot is built on a seemingly very flexible blockchain toolkit, called Substrate. Substrate can be used to build blockchains; one of those blockchains is the Polkadot relay chain, which is analagous to the Ethereum 2 beacon chain, a chain with minimal capabilities designed specifically to secure yet other blockchains, called “parachains” in Polkadot. Substrate can also be used to build those parachains.
A substrate blockchain can run smart contracts in
either WASM or Ethereum’s EVM.
Those WASM contracts are most easily written with ink,
which is described in their readme as an “eDSL”,
or “embedded domain-specific language”,
which in this case means that it is an expressive Rust library
that uses macros to hide the complex mechanisms interacting
with the VM runtime.
What’s my goal?
I am going to follow the platform’s docs as close as I can, and write down my thoughts as I do so. I hope to end up with some functional contract deployed to a testnet.
The starting point
Polkadot is Parity’s primary blockchain at this point. Substrate is a platform for building blockchains. I know the two are related, but am not confident in how. I am sure Substrate can be used to build Polkadot “parachains”, which are essentially Polkadot shards, or perhaps sidechains; I think Substrate is used to build Polkadot itself; I do not know if Substrate can be used to build independent blockchains.
For now, I only care about running contracts on the main Polkadot chain, and am not interested in parachains.
I am going to start at the Polkadot developer docs,
and see where that leads me.
For now I am going to ignore the ink repo,
assuming that the Polkadot docs will lead me there when I need it.
Let’s roll.
Reading the Polkadot docs
Starting at Parity’s Polkadot page
A big button immediately leads me to main Polkadot page,
Not sure why I started at Parity’s page instead of the Polkadot website, but at least it directed me to the right place.
I’m guessing the “Build” link is where I need to go as a developer.
There are also prominent links to a “lightpaper” and a “whitepaper”, which I open for reading later:
On the “Build” page I see
“when the mainnet comes”
but the Polkadot front page said the mainnet was live. Seems like this copy needs to be updated.
Ok, this page is prominently pitching Substrate to me, not Polkadot smart contract programming.
Wow, this page is all about Substrate. How do I write a Polkadot contract?
I have no clues yet.
Because Polkadot is (I think) built with Substrate, I guess I have to click through to the Substrate documentation, and learn about Substrate contract programming in order to understand Polkadot contract programming.
Before I follow the links to Substrate, I poke around a few other links on the Polkadot site.
Under the “Technology” section I see a “Documentation” link that links to a wiki:
Having important docs on a wiki doesn’t give me great confidence - dev wiki’s often imply low quality, like the team doesn’t have the resources to create proper docs.
The wiki though looks like typical docs, not a wiki, and seems to have a good deal of content. On it I find the “builder’s portal”:
So this seems like a good place to be as a new Polkadot smart contract developer. For now I think I’ll ignore the Substrate website and follow these docs.
So the documentation flow here seems to have not worked for me: the most prominent links were leading me to Substrate documentation, while I think I wanted to end up at the Polkadot Builder’s Portal, the link to which was not as obvious.
Aside: clicking several clicks down the Substrate documentation flow leads me the Substrate Developer Hub:
This also seems useful, and I’m guessing I will need it eventually, but for now I’m going to follow the Polkadot docs, not the Substrate docs.
(After completing this blog series, I do think it was worth reading some of the Polkadot Builder’s Portal before the Substrate Developer Hub, even though new developers are going to be interacting mostly with Substrate, as that establishes the relationship between the two projects).
Reading the Polkadot Builder’s Portal
There are a lot of subjects to read here, most of them not directly about getting started with smart contract programming. Assuming I need some background though before getting started, I just start reading front to back, with the intention of jumping to the contract documentation once I think I’ve got the basics of what I need to know.
So I click forward to the “Polkadot Builder’s Starters Guide”:
https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/build-build-with-polkadot
Apparently Substrate isn’t the only way to build parachains. There’s another framework (or “Parachain Development Kit”) called Cumulus.
No, apparently I’m wrong. I quick clickthrough to Cumulus reveals that Cumulus builds on Substrate.
I’m quickly getting the impression that hacking in the Polkdaot ecosystem is going to require a lot of learning.
Oh, there’s a section here called “What you need to know”. I feel a wave of relief, just as I was starting to panic.
Ok, now I know that Substrate is for building blockchains, Cumulus is an extension to Substrate that lets Substrate blockchains become Polkadot parachains.
Polkadot itself does not support smart contracts!
I am learning.
Contracts are run on parachains.
I hope I don’t have to build my own parachain just to experiment with Substrate smart contracts.
On the other hand, the prospect of having an entire parachain to myself, to run my smart contracts, is enticing.
I’m a little excited.
Polkadot supports parachains and parathreads. Parachains have to commit to the Polkadot relay chain every block, but parathreads do not.
There are separate docs for developers who want to build an entire parachain and for those that want to build a smart contract. For now I am the latter, I follow the link,
These docs have me excited about all the options available to Polkadot developers.
It does seem potentially extremely complicated, in a domain that is already extremely complicated.
So you want to build a smart contract
Following the previously-linked docs here:
Apparently smart contracts today can only be developed on a local development parachain. According to the docs there aren’t live parachains available for smart contract development yet.
So we’re going to have to create a Substrate parachain for ourselves. Substrate seems to be very flexible, with building blocks called pallets, and to create a WASM smart-contract parachain we need to use the Contracts pallet.
The docs have mentioned the “FRAME” library a few times, but I’ve missed a definition of what that is.
I see some typos in the docs.
We’re good open-source citizens: let’s see if we can find the source and fix them!
Yeah, this is a “wiki”, which in this case actually means that it’s just a GitHub repo, and the “edit” link leads me to the GitHub online editor. It’s pretty awkward as a document-editing interface, but for a simple patch I manage to make the edit and submit a PR after two tries.
The docs go on to mention Edgeware, a live smart-contract-enabled Substrate chain (but not yet a parachain) where devs can deploy their contracts. So I was wrong (or the docs were wrong) that contracts can only be developed on dev nets, and not deployed to a live network.
The “so you want to build a smart contract” docs cover a few more concepts and then says
“Good luck!”
It’s not obvious what to do next, but the docs do indicate that the state of the ecosystem is early, so that’s not a surprise. We have to create our own game plan.
The game plan:
- create a substrate devnet with the contracts pallet
- write an ink contract
- test that ink contract on our local devnet
If we can accomplish that within this blog post series I’ll be happy.
I’m kinda excited that writing a smart contract here first involves creating my own personal blockchain. I hope that it is easy to do, and that having my own blockchain gives me lots of control during development.
Continued in part 2.