A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SMART CONTRACT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES: SECURITY, PERFORMANCE, AND OPTIMIZATION TRADE-OFFs

Abstract

Smart contracts have become a fundamental component of blockchain ecosystems, and their reliability is strongly shaped by the programming languages in which they are written. While prior studies have classified vulnerabilities, fewer have quantitatively examined how language design and secure coding practices affect performance and resilience. To address this gap, this study empirically compares Solidity and Vyper under controlled conditions and complements these experiments with a literature-based evaluation of Rust and Move. Test scenarios included deployment, deposits, withdrawals, arithmetic overflow, reentrancy, and transaction origin misuse. For both vulnerable and secure variants in Solidity and Vyper, metrics such as gas consumption, deployment size, and runtime execution time were collected. The results indicate that deployment costs differ substantially between the two languages (Solidity ≈ 177 k gas vs Vyper ≈ 135 k gas, ~24% lower), whereas runtime performance is mixed: deposit calls are nearly identical (Δ ≈ 0.02 ms), whereas withdraw shows a noticeable gap (Δ ≈ 4.97 ms) favoring Vyper; nevertheless, these call-level differences remain small relative to the larger deployment-time gap. Importantly, secure coding practices such as explicit arithmetic checks and the Checks–Effects–Interactions pattern eliminate critical vulnerabilities while adding less than 1% to the overall execution cost. Although Rust and Move are considered through a literature-based review, they illustrate alternative approaches that embed security guarantees directly into the language. Based on these observations, this study proposes a measurable framework to understand how different smart contract programming languages vary in terms of security and efficiency, emphasizing the role of language design and secure coding practices in shaping contract development.