There was an evening when I opened the docs for DuskEVM and DuskVM side by side, with a note file full of arrows next to them, then ran a simulation test myself: with the same Smart Contract flow, how does my mind think through it under EVM Compatibility, and when moving to Native Execution, how many times does that thinking have to change...
I divided the flow into 10 steps: 6 steps familiar from Solidity, Gas, Account Model; the remaining 4 steps touch Rust/WASM, Transaction Model, Ledger Logic, State Transition, Privacy and Zero-Knowledge Proof.
6/10 = 60% sounds light, but the remaining 40% is where the time really went.
because syntax is only the outer layer.
the harder part is the mental model.
in EVM, I think in terms of contract call, account state, gas consumption; moving to DuskVM, the questions change completely: how is state represented, where does Privacy sit, when does Zero-Knowledge Proof enter the State Transition?
to be candid, this part made me like Dusk more... but also made me more cautious.
I tried another 8 tasks for an app with Protocol Assets: 5 EVM tasks came almost by reflex, while 3 native tasks forced me to stop and draw the dependency and execution flow.
3/8 = 37.5% of the tasks, but Context Switching still consumed a lot of effort.
this is not an official benchmark, just the way I measure cognitive load when a team lives across 2 Execution Environments.
EVM Compatibility makes onboarding faster.
but if Privacy, Zero-Knowledge and Protocol Assets sit deep inside Native Execution, developer still has to move through two stacks, two Ledger Logic, two Transaction Model.
I am not afraid of multi-layer architecture.
for me, good architecture must make developer correctly understand State, Execution Semantics and Security Assumption before the code runs.
what do you all think, does Dusk’s greater advantage lie in the EVM entry point... or in its ability to make developer truly master the native layer behind it?
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