Libs Narc - Is That a Language?

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The language that people use as an alternative to C++ is Rust, which is widely used in the blockchain community. We want to make a good library for helping you construct circuits, but we're going to do it in Rust. And we're more confident that this sapling is not going to mess up because we're using a language that has better abstractions. So having a language that's going to have clean abstractions and help you avoid mistakes is usually useful in trying to make reliable software. It was designed now 30, 40 years ago. The idea was that it didn't want to get between you and the machine.

In this week’s episode, Anna has a one-on-one chat with Alex Ozdemir, a PhD student at Stanford researching formal methods, cryptography and distributed systems. Alex’s work is closely tied to the world of generalized computations within zero knowledge systems. He is one of the main developers of CirC, an infrastructure framework for building zero knowledge languages.

In their conversation, Alex and Anna take a bird’s eye view of the current landscape of zk languages and libraries. Alex explains the history and current state-of-the-art of circuit-building tools, touching on libraries like Libsnark, Bellman and more comprehensive tools like Arkworks; hardware description languages like Circom; and the more dev-friendly family of RAM-register languages like ZoKrates, Pequin, Cairo, Leo and many more. Here, the race is still on as a number of academic and business-oriented teams grapple with limitations to memory access & performance given by zero knowledge proving systems.

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Here are all the links for this episode:

An intro dive into the world of zero knowledge languages and ZoKrates
Circom and Hermez with Jordi Baylina, Zero Knowledge episode 145
zk-SNARKs for Scale with Matter Labs, Zero Knowledge episode 72
zkStudyClub about CirC
zkStudyClub on Polynomial Commitments
StarkWare’s Eli Ben-Sasson on STARKs and Cairo, Zero Knowledge episode 96
Pratyush Mishra on all things Arkworks, Zero Knowledge episode 169
Alex’s Stanford page and paper on CirC.

Thanks to this week’s sponsor, Mina Protocol.

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Join the community at Mina’s free virtual Illuminate Summit on March 28th, visit illuminate.minaprotocol.com to secure your spot.

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