Stellar Community Fund

By stellarpro.dev

Soroban-VSCode Extension

SCF #17

$39.9K

Legacy v4.0 Award

Awarded

Develop a Visual Studio Code extension that provides Stellar/Soroban developers a unified tooling user experience and workflow.

Products & Services

The Problem

Developer productivity relies on having great tools and that includes an industry-grade IDE. In addition to a great IDE, you also probably rely on a multitude of other tools to get your job done. Currently, Stellar/Soroban development requires you to switch between quite a few tools: the Stellar Laboratory, the Soroban-CLI, RunKit, Postman, curl, and your own scripts and code snippets, among others, to leverage core features of the platform. While there are online solutions (specialized IDEs) helping users to streamline workflow, and they are great for your first steps, once you deep-dive for a while you outgrow them very quickly or find their features limiting. Also, having to “learn” how they work, only puts more cognitive load when you are already on a steep learning curve for Stellar/Soroban.

The Solution

Why re-invent the wheel? Let’s Stellar/Soroban-ize a tool already used by millions: Visual Studio Code.

The roadmap ahead

Our extension will provide easy access from within Visual Studio Code to built-in Soroban platform services and features, such as: Calling RPC/API endpoints, such as getLedgerEntries, getTransaction, and sendTransaction. Translate XDR to/from UTF-8. Create and Send Transactions (local and on-chain) in an easier manner. Manage Identities such as Accounts and Contracts. Manage Networks and Server connections. View and record Events, with filtering support. Download contract code, so bindings/interfaces can be extracted. ... among others.

The roadmap even further ahead

Visual Studio Code also runs in a web browser: www.vscode.dev, and while not all extensions can be added and used in that environment (there are certain restrictions), it certainly does potentially allow to have a fully-featured, completely web-based Visual Studio Code user experience (no local installs and cloud-based development flow). The current problem (which can be solved by using remote development and/or Codespaces, but both of these solutions are cost-prohibitive), is related to usage of the Rust toolchain currently required for Soroban development. Once this general problem is solved, our solution could be deployed to Visual Studio Code on the web, making it the #1 developer choice for building projects, which unfortunately can result in downgrading of other Stellar/Soroban-specialized online IDEs currently out there (or make them more of a user choice or preference).

A note on global audience

There are no distribution restrictions on Visual Studio Code extensions, so our potential market is every developer wanting a better experience when building Stellar/Soroban projects. However, we do want to point out that we plan to launch v.1 with i10n support, and we will support both English (default) and Spanish.