The DFINITY Canister Smart Contract SDK Is Now Open Source

The SDK is the first toolkit for developers building dapps on the Internet Computer blockchain.

By Diego Prats, Director of Product | DFINITY

The DFINITY Foundation’s R&D team is excited to announce the open-sourcing of the software development kit (SDK) for authoring Motoko-based canister smart contracts. This follows the previous open source release of the SDK for Rust-based canisters. This open source release also includes the full source code to DFINITY’s dfx command-line utility.

The repository is viewable here: https://github.com/dfinity/sdk

Apart from the Developer Center’s documentation page, the SDK is the first entry point for developers to begin building dapps on the Internet Computer. Since network Genesis in May, this SDK has already been used to create thousands of smart contracts on the Internet Computer, many of which are complete Web 3.0 dapps.

Why the SDK is important

Various projects have at one point or another been referred to as “the SDK.” When I joined DFINITY in summer 2018, for example, there was a bare-bones C SDK.

This particular SDK repository started development on August 13, 2019 and was introduced to the world the following October at the Internet Computer’s Copper release. This first, open “lean and mean” release allowed developers to:

• Author canister smart contracts in Motoko and compile to WebAssembly (Wasm).
• Run a local instance or “node” of the Internet Computer — known as a replica — on their computer.
• Deploy Wasm as standalone canisters.
• Interact with the canisters using a command-line interface.

Over the last two years, the goal behind the SDK — making developers’ lives easier — has not changed, but the SDK itself has certainly been refined by dev community usage.

Why open-sourcing it is important

1. Trust — Many developers build smart contracts with the SDK. It is important that they be able to review the code they are relying on.
2. Inspiring the community — Interested SDK developers can implement their own SDK by reading The Internet Computer Interface Specification, and the Foundation wants to inspire more developers by opening the code. Fork away!
3. Engaging the community — Because this SDK is not a part of the Internet Computer, its updates do not need to go through NNS proposals. By letting others contribute via pull requests, the Foundation is tapping the best ideas that can improve the developer experience.

Other relevant open source projects

1. https://github.com/dfinity/docs — Doc for the SDK
2. https://github.com/dfinity/cdk-rs — Rust canister development kit
3. https://github.com/dfinity/motoko — Motoko Language for building smart contract canisters
4. https://github.com/dfinity/vscode-motoko — The VSCode extension for Motoko
5. https://github.com/dfinity/agent-rs — A collection of libraries and tools for building software around the Internet Computer, in Rust.
6. https://github.com/dfinity/agent-js — A collection of libraries and tools for building software around the Internet Computer, in JavaScript.
7. https://github.com/dfinity/motoko-playground- Motoko playground
8. https://github.com/dfinity/candid — Candid Library for the Internet Computer
9. https://github.com/dfinity/cycles-wallet — cycles wallet
10. https://github.com/dfinity/ic — Internet Computer replica

See more here: https://github.com/orgs/dfinity/repositories

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Start building at smartcontracts.org and join our developer community at forum.dfinity.org.

The DFINITY Canister Smart Contract SDK Is Now Open Source was originally published in The Internet Computer Review on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.