Quick Q's on Pluribus/Smart Contracts

[Jonathan Shapiro]

Looking for quick feedback to answer a question for a client

1. To what extend do current approaches to distributed smart contracts depend on having a Pluribus-like causal order comm protocol?
2. How much of what needs to be expressed for distributed smart contracts is able to be expressed in a statically compiled programming language?
3. What progress, if any, exists for smart contract support in Rust or Go?

Thanks!

[Mark S. Miller]

On Sat, Aug 29, 2026 at 11:39 AM Jonathan Shapiro <jonathan....@gmail.com> wrote:

Looking for quick feedback to answer a question for a client

1. To what extend do current approaches to distributed smart contracts depend on having a Pluribus-like causal order comm protocol?

Agoric does not rely on causal order and our Swingset kernel does not provide causal order. Rather we rely on what we've come to call "end-to-end reference fifo". Rather than unpack that here, practically Agoric on-chain vats only speak to vats on the same chain, therefore using the same single-"machine" Swingset kernel. For that non-distributed case, this effectively reduces to "point-to-point fifo".

Causal order >= E-Order >= FIFO.

We never contemplated causal order because it is impossible for mutually suspicious machines communicating over untrusted networks. We were going to do E-order. Why we retreated from E-Order to FIFO is a long story.

 

1. How much of what needs to be expressed for distributed smart contracts is able to be expressed in a statically compiled programming language?

What constraints would that impose? What can a dynamic interpreted (or jit-compiled) language do that a statically compiled language cannot?

 

1. What progress, if any, exists for smart contract support in Rust or Go?

I've seen some Rust but not Go. Also some Haskell and OCaml variants. But I haven't looked for a long time so this info is stale.

 

Thanks!

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  Cheers,
  --MarkM