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With Web3 growing every day, new programming languages are entering the space. Still, its progress is impeded by a shortage of developers. EpicGames introduced Verse, a programming language for Metaverse. Verse aims to engage the community in a rich language. With this, Verse joins the likes of Clarity, Solidity, Curry, Mercury and Rust web3 programming languages.
Verse is an open-sourced declarative, functional logic language (like Curry and Mercury) which has an unusual static type system (types are first-class values). Verse is lenient, as in everything gets evaluated in the end only when it is “ready”. It cannot be strict as it includes call-by-value (functions can be called before the argument has a value). Instead of using nomads, it has an effect system.
Verse is extremely ambitious in that it stretches from end users to professional developers with transactional memory at scale and strong stability guarantees. Verse is scalable to running code and supports billions of users; its compile time guarantees that a model subsumes the API of the previous version. Verse is extensible and can be learned as a first language, enhancing over time without breaking code. Epic Games’ future projects include MaxVerse and ShipVerse. Previously, NVIDIA came up with a real-time graphics collaboration platform called Omniverse.
According to developer analytics company SlashData, about 60% of Web3 developers entered the industry last year, which is an all-time high; it still only accounts for a small portion of the world’s 31.1 million software engineers as of the first quarter of 2022. This becomes a bigger problem due to the lack of knowledge of specialised programming languages used to create smart contracts on cryptocurrencies Solana and Ethereum.
Even though Rust is coming fast, Solidity is currently the most widely used Web3 language, with over 4,000 developers using it each month solely on the Ethereum blockchain. Rust is used with cryptocurrencies and blockchain and delivers code faster. In the Bitcoin Web3 environment, Clarity is specifically made for building smart contracts and decentralised applications, or dApps. Now, Verse joins the league of Web3 programming languages. Let’s wait and see how it impacts the Metaverse.
