A new internal IOG Developer Experience department will improve development agility

Designed for global reach and enhanced functionality, Cardano is now moving from its core capabilities to a living and breathing smart contract platform. Gradual optimization and scientifically verified system improvements lead the way for Cardano's growth and maturity.

‘Move fast and break things’ isn’t the way Cardano is built. Working at the forefront of technology, and with our research agenda at the core, we use formal methods, such as mathematical specifications, property-based tests, and proofs to deliver high assurance software systems and give confidence to users for the management of digital funds.

Programmability

While we chose the Haskell programming language as the basis to achieve strong guarantees on the functional correctness of core system components, there is no single language or tool that helps us deliver a rock-solid blockchain platform.

With so many possibilities of different programming scenarios, our goal is to ensure that both internal developers and the wider developer ecosystem have a coherent and consistent experience while building on Cardano. So, while working with different programming languages and development tools in the infrastructure, we’re also pushing this development to the limits. This means enhancing coding principles and expanding the capabilities of various systems and methodologies.

Any effort to grant wider functionality and use needs to start with internal processes. So, to provide a flexible and consistent environment for everyone building and deploying on Cardano, we have now created a new internal structure that improves the agility of development.

Developer experience department

To establish an environment, where developers at IOG are not hindered by the tools they use in their day-to-day work, we have created a new Developer Experience department (DevX), led by Moritz Angermann.

Moritz Angermann explains:

Think of DevX as an internal technical support center for IO developers. It primarily focuses on providing assistance and tooling to different teams assisting with their Continuous Integration (CI) and ‘Build’ needs and ensuring that setup procedures don’t affect timely deliveries.

The department involves cooperation with all engineering teams and is also responsible for amplifying synergies between teams and streamlining development processes. Another focus of DevX is improving the Haskell tooling as a natural continuation of the ‘tools’ team that is now part of DevX.

The tooling

While Cardano is a multi-functional smart contract development platform, it is still early days and the ledger and network is being gradually upgraded as we go. Cardano is designed to serve millions of users everywhere and thus we’re adapting it to be flexible upon increasing demand. This means that along with the network growth, we are tuning protocol parameters to adjust to extending scalability and throughput properties.

The DevX department is creating tooling that will enable continuous ledger upgrades and optimizations. This tooling addresses developers’ needs and allows for better utilization of various building libraries. Streamlining the Haskell development experience includes:

• substantial improvement of cross-compilation capabilities
• enhanced plugin support
• work on interoperability with the Rust programming language and other languages

These improvements enable developers not only to work with Haskell using libraries written in other languages but use Haskell libraries from other languages. Along with that, the department also concentrates on boosting the workflow relevant to using Nix, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) and GHCJS (Haskell to Javascript compiler) support.

As Cardano continues to evolve as a fully open infrastructure model during 2022, we hope in due course these improvements will provide the broader developer community with better tooling for working on different projects and deploying them on Cardano.

DevX contributions are included across multiple Input Output repositories, and you can check out Haskell Nix development progress in this repository or learn more about the Glasgow Haskell Compiler development by going to gitlab.haskell.org.