Corda Top Ten Facts #6: Massive developer productivity

Corda Top Ten Facts #6: Massive developer productivity

Myth: Corda doesn’t support the EVM

Actually, this myth is true! It is true that Corda does not use the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Why would it? Even Ethereum is moving away from it.

The Ethereum community have done some amazing things and made some good choices in some areas. But the decision to invent a new virtual machine, new languages, new tools and new frameworks was… interesting.

The stated reasons were admirable: virtual machines for blockchains need to be deterministic. So Ethereum invented a new language ecosystem from scratch. An utterly huge and impressive endeavour, of course, but also one that is still years behind the mature language ecosystems.

With Corda, we took a more mainstream path. Corda takes the world’s most popular and successful virtual machine — the Java Virtual Machine — and tweaks it to enforce deterministic execution when needed. We call the deterministic engine the determinator. It’s open source and we’ll be publishing a lot more information about it in the coming weeks.

Why does this matter? It matters because it means that the world’s ten million Java developers can adopt Corda with almost zero retraining.

All those billions of dollars of investment in IDEs, compilers, training, tooling, languages and more can be reused when you build on Corda.