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Having written Solidity, I find it to be a very user friendly language as it shares many similarities to JavaScript (while being statically typed). I'm not sure

Having written Solidity, I find it to be a very user friendly language as it shares many similarities to JavaScript (while being statically typed). I'm not sure the example on the home page is the best representation of the benefits of Fe, however, in relation to Solidity. In one of the bullet points it highlights: "Improved decidability - Fe limits dynamic program behavior to improve decidability and allow more precise gas cost estimation." I think it would be helpful to see an example of that or a side-by-side comparison, if the goal is to win over Solidity devs. If I can really save gas or prevent common bugs more easily, the page needs to do more to sell that point.

andrewflnr 4y ago
I'm not into Ethereum, but "more precise estimation of gas costs" sounds like a letdown compared to what you would want to build a really reliable smart contract. Can't a contract just die if it can't pay its gas bill? With all the investment in blockchain (as you yourself mentioned in another comment), and so much money riding on the correctness of contracts, it seems like the incentives should line up to develop proper, usable formal methods (starting with backing down from Turing-completeness for the most part, most likely). That would be a pretty nice side effect for us skeptics. That's honestly what I was hoping for, with OP.
- trianglesphere 4y ago
  Contract’s don’t (more accurately almost never) pay for gas. Gas estimation is done when sending by the end user. Some parts of gas estimation can be done statically, but some of the cost of certain operations are dependent on the data being loaded from the state. I’d like a tool to set an upper bound on gas usage (current approach is to execute the tx on pending state and add 10-30%), but solidity does not provide one.
  - andrewflnr 4y ago
    So it's just the individual user operation or whatever that fails if you mess up the gas estimation?

andrewflnr 4y ago

I'm not into Ethereum, but "more precise estimation of gas costs" sounds like a letdown compared to what you would want to build a really reliable smart contract. Can't a contract just die if it can't pay its gas bill? With all the investment in blockchain (as you yourself mentioned in another comment), and so much money riding on the correctness of contracts, it seems like the incentives should line up to develop proper, usable formal methods (starting with backing down from Turing-completeness for the most part, most likely). That would be a pretty nice side effect for us skeptics. That's honestly what I was hoping for, with OP.

trianglesphere 4y ago
Contract’s don’t (more accurately almost never) pay for gas. Gas estimation is done when sending by the end user. Some parts of gas estimation can be done statically, but some of the cost of certain operations are dependent on the data being loaded from the state. I’d like a tool to set an upper bound on gas usage (current approach is to execute the tx on pending state and add 10-30%), but solidity does not provide one.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  So it's just the individual user operation or whatever that fails if you mess up the gas estimation?