Zilliqa + Scilla | Exploring Sharding

Sharding is a concept that’s widely used in databases, to make them more efficient. A shard is a horizontal portion of a database, with each shard stored in a separate server instance.

In essence of using a blockchain, nodes that maintain a shard maintain information only on that shard in a shared manner, so within a shard, the decentralization is still maintained.

Let’s get started into Zilliqa, which is the first sharding blockchain on mainnet. It uses Scilla, short for Smart Contract Intermediate-Level Language, is an intermediate-level smart contract language being developed for Zilliqa.

HelloWorld is usually good place to start for practice, we also have to find a good editor, or IDE that can help verify contracts before trying to deploy.

HelloWorld.scilla

Let’s start with a look at the classical “HelloWorld” contract.

Libraries

A Scilla contract may come with some helper libraries that declare purely functional components of a contract.
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A library is declared in the preamble of a contract using the keyword library followed by the name of the library.
HelloWorld contract code has a function one_msg in the library and two global constants.
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Standard libraries shipped with the language can be added using the keyword import followed by the name of the library.

Code Snippet: “HelloWorld”

(Im)mutable variables

Scilla contracts use two types of state variables: mutable and immutable.
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Immutable variables are those that get initialized at the time of contract creation. Once initialized, their values cannot be changed. HelloWorld has one immutable variable named owner.
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Mutable variables are those whose value will change even after the contract has been created. HelloWorld has one mutable variable named welcome_msg.

Functions // Transitions

Transitions are functions that change the value of mutable variables and can communicate with other contracts.
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The first transition, setHello, takes a String as input, updates welcome_msg and informs the caller of the success/failure.

The second transition, getHello, simply sends out a message to the caller with the current value of welcome_msg.

Finding an IDE

Scilla developed an easy way to test basic contracts out in a browser environment. Scilla IDE

From there you can go to the far right tab and deploy the contract and see if you have success.

While yes, I think we all got PTSD from “Along Came Polly” , and the infamous discovery of the word ‘sharting’. Sharding does have great potential

Final Thoughts

Hopefully you gained some more information about a sharding blockchain and just a little bit of understanding of how the code works.

Wider adoption of sharding requires the blockchain and crypto developers to work on an important area.

While communication between nodes within a shard is smooth, inter-shard communication is currently not easy and requires the development of a separate protocol.

Addressing this key requirement will potentially result into a wider adoption of sharding, and that’ll help blockchains handle higher transaction throughput .