A hands-on workshop guide for new developers by Odisha DAO

1. Introduction

Arbitrum Stylus lets developers write Ethereum-compatible smart contracts in multiple programming languages — not just Solidity.

Under the hood, Stylus compiles your code to WebAssembly (WASM), which runs inside Arbitrum nodes.

That means:

• You can use languages like C, C++, Rust, Zig, Go, etc.
• Stylus contracts can talk directly to Solidity contracts (interop is seamless).
• Huge performance gains (10–70x faster, 100–500x more memory efficient than Solidity).

In this workshop, we’ll use C — one of the most powerful, low-level languages — to write and deploy Stylus contracts.

2. Setup

Tools Required

• clang/llvm → compiles C into WebAssembly (-target=wasm32)
• wasm-ld → linker for WASM binaries (ships with llvm)
• cargo-stylus → Stylus CLI (written in Rust, handles deploy/check)
• make + git → build system & version control

Install Steps

1. Install LLVM + clang:

   sudo apt-get install llvm clang lld
   
   

   Make sure clang supports wasm:

   clang --target=wasm32 -v
   
   

2. Install Rust (needed for cargo-stylus):

   curl <https://sh.rustup.rs> -sSf | sh