Which programming language is best to use for writing smart contracts in Hyperledger Fabric's (a private blockchain) chaincode: Go, Java, or Javascript? What are the limitations of each language provided the programmer has beginner-level proficiency in each?
Please read the following paper https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8543246
Mohamed Amine Ferrag Thanks for suggesting this paper. I will surely go through it (y)
A chaincode typically handles business logic agreed to by members of the network, so it may be considered as a "smart contract".
Hyperledger initially was build using Go language, and Hyperledger team has aim to support as many languages as possible so that developers familiar with the language can start working on chaincode development rather than learning new language. Currently Hyperledger Fabric offers a number of APIs to support developing smart contracts (chaincode) in various programming languages.
Smart contract APIs are available for Go, Node.js, and Java. It is always big debate which language to choose to implement base features and better performance, here are things to consider:
1-Go being default language all the chaincode base features are made available in Go Language first then in other languages
2-Node.js chaincode uses npm install at the time of container building, which is slow and might fail due to network problems, while Golang just compiles the source code without fetching anything.
3-docker images size for chaincode are a lot bigger with nodejs than with go, in a 1:8 factor (180MB in Go vs 1.5GB in nodejs). If you need to test a network with several peers or several chaincodes interacting, you'll have to wait minutes and minutes between each network relaunch. A pain
4-Since the 1.0.0 release, Java chaincode support was disabled for the time being and enabled in 1.1.0 release
5-Since the key-value store writes byte arrays, using the Java API means that we’d need to either serialize stored objects or update byte arrays manually. Either way, this would mean a lot of boilerplate code. The Go API, on the other hand, has structs. This makes the whole process of retrieving or updating stored values trivial. Even in a general sense, in Go you will just have to write less code to do the same.
Selecting the language for chaincode language can be personal choice depends upon different factors, I will choose Go Language for the development being default language new features are available in this language.
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