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Introduction

Aiken is a new programming language and toolchain for developing smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain.

Philosophy

Our main goal is to improve the smart contract development experience for the Cardano blockchain. Aiken takes inspiration from many modern languages such as aiken, rust, and elm which are known for friendly error messages and an overall excellent developer experience. We believe Cardano deserves a dedicated language with these kinds of features, developed in the open with the community.

Goals

  • We want an easy and safe way to write Cardano smart contracts. We should be able to get started in minutes not days.
  • We want a complete and delightful experience. A modern blockchain deserves a modern smart contract toolkit. This includes editor integrations such as LSP and tree-sitter along with fancy error messages.
  • We want there to be as little configuration as possible. It should work out of the box and have opinionated reasonable conventions established with the community.
  • We want to have a modular design so that components can be picked and chosen as needed. Like the unix philosophy.

Roadmap

In general, the goal is to port everything we need for plutus to Rust. This will be needed if we ever want to build a full node in Rust. Since we will have these tools natively in Rust, we plan on building a new high level language for writing smart contracts on Cardano.

Components

The Aiken project is made up of a few different components. The two most important ones are the high level Aiken language for writing smart contracts and a rust library for working with Untyped Plutus Core.

Learn more about them in the next sections of this book.