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argotorg
fe
Rust2021–2021
argotorg / fe

fe

Emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum blockchain.

5Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum blockchain.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month10 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-01-20 15:35:26 UTC to 2021-12-05 19:39:47 UTC.

01232021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 commentsJan 20212021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 2 submissions, 0 comments2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsJun 20212021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2021-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 commentsDec 2021

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Jan 20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC110
Feb 20212021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20212021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC220
Apr 20212021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC110
May 20212021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20212021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20212021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC110
Aug 20212021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20212021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-10-01 00:00:00 UTC211
Oct 20212021-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20212021-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20212021-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312

What Hacker News says

10 sources
Yeah looking at elements.rs, it appears that they have the translation layer I alluded to: https://github.com/ethereum/fe/blob/bfeffe82b4f8623330c1ebb1... It's not obvious to me though and I couldn't find documentation for ABI compatibility. For example, does delegatecall to solidity work? That requires that Fe also use the same "binary" layout for storage in which slot index is used to generate the storage hash: https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/v0.8.10/internals/layout_in...
In Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum blockchain
For those not familiar with Solidity, there is a peculiarity in the "ABI" that makes it painful to interop between languages. In solidity, there are types called "contracts" which are like classes in other languages. When you call a function in a different contract, the dispatch is routed using the first few bytes of the has of the signature [1]. For example, to transfer ERC-20 tokens you dispatch using `hash(transfer(address, uint256))[:4]`, meaning that you put those first four bytes at the beginning of the data that you pass to the receiving contract. Just like the native world, this causes a problem when you try to interface between different languages. In Fe, the types have different names so this hashing scheme can't work without a translation layer. From some of the issues it looks like interoperability may be a problem [2]. That's
Read the rest
ok if you write all the contracts that your dApp interacts with, but as time goes on dApps interact and call into one another more and more often. There are probably also lots of opportunities here for exploiting confusion at these boundaries, so if you're inclined and know how to use tornado you may be able to make quite a bit of money off contracts that use Fe. [1] https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/v0.8.10/abi-spec.html#funct... [2] https://github.com/ethereum/fe/issues/592
In Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum blockchain
Not a fan of downvoting for contributions that are on topic, in fact I can't downvote on HN and I think I prefer it that way. But there is a reason why what he posts is just non-sense. Cardano doesn't scale farther than Ethereum or in fact any other blockchain that bets heavily on decentralization. Cardano can do nowadays a theoretical maximum of 6-7 transactions per second [0]. In practice, it's doing around 1 transaction per second because it doesn't see much use [1], which is the true reason why transaction costs are negligible. While Ethereum does 15-20 transactions per second, day in and day out and is working at full capacity [2], which is why Ethereum transactions can be quite costly as the demand is greater than the available blockspace. These are by the way real transactions, not the theoretical maximum I presented for Cardano. T
Read the rest
ransaction throughput has nothing to do with the programming language used, it's an intrinsic limitation of the blockchain and is dependent on a bunch of network parameters that you can tweak (block size, block time and transaction size). You can tweak them a bit but if you tweak severely then you pay the cost through decentralization as the compute and network requirements of the node rise quickly, requiring beefier nodes which lead to centralization. A centralized blockchain is pointless, it's like running a SQL database with extra steps. See the recent Solana outage [3]. The programming language thing is just a distraction that has nothing to do with scalability. Ethereum doesn't run Solidity, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) runs the low-level OPCODES that it has defined [4]. Solidity code is transpiled into lower level languages and converted into the EVM's OPCODES. In fact, there are other programming languages to write Ethereum Smart Contracts like Fe (heavily inspired by Rust) [5] or Vyper (heavily inspired by Python) [6]. In the same way, Cardano doesn't run Haskell or Plutus or Marlowe, it runs the OPCODES defined by its Virtual Machine (IELE). Poor language-design and poor transpiling can lead to some inefficiencies in the performance of the code but in the end the true bottleneck is in the network throughput. Blockchain scalability is solved via Layer 2s and sharding. Cardano is very far behind Ethereum on this regard considering Ethereum has deployed as of today many different layer 2s [7] while Cardano doesn't have any and you cannot expect to see any for the foreseeable future as they just released smart contracts. Cardano's layer 2 roadmap is also antiquated as it relies on state channels [8], which is a scalability solution that is intrinsically more limited than Rollups. State channels were all the rage a couple of years ago but they have been superseded by rollups as they are far less limited [9]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/comments/prbhp4/cardano_blo... [1] https://cardanoscan.io/ [2] https://etherscan.io/chart/tx [3] https://cointelegraph.com/news/solana-attributes-major-outag... [4] https://ethervm.io/ [5] https://github.com/ethereum/fe [6] https://vyper.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ [7] https://l2beat.com [8] https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-s... [9] https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/comments/pf25jk/comment/hb1...
In It costs $436 to deploy a smartcontract on Ethereum

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