Why viem
The current state of low-level Ethereum interface abstractions lack in at least one of the following four areas: developer experience, stability, bundle size and/or performance – it's a quadrilemma.
viem is a TypeScript Interface for Ethereum (similar to ethers.js & web3.js), that provides low-level unopinonated & stateless primitives for interacting with Ethereum – with an initial primary focus on EVM Provider, Contract & Network abstractions. It aims to address the quadrilemma by:
- a great developer experience through extensive testing, robust APIs, comprehensive documentation and type safety,
- increased stability as a result of testing coverage (both behavioral & branch) & type safety,
- slim bundle size from not only tree-shaking, but also a minimalistic modular architecture,
- bump in performance by only performing long-running asynchronous tasks when required/directed.
Whereas other low-level interfaces provide lock-in to opinions over JSON-RPC & EVM, viem wants consumers to be able to opt-in to opinions by providing lightweight, unopinionated, and stateless primitives & building blocks. This means that the consumer can define their own opinionated implementations (ie. wagmi) without the need for workarounds for escape hatches.
viem will help developers build with a higher level of accuracy and correctness (through type safety & developer experience). It will also integrate extremely well with wagmi so folks can start using it without much upfront switching cost.