The EVM is IMO the most secure and usable of all the crypto VMs.
You can convince yourself of that by comparing the e2e devex of a Foundry user vs anyone else. The verbs you care for: Build, test/fuzz, docs, verify, sim against forks, trace, debug.
Doesn’t even come close. The thing people don’t get is the VM doesn’t matter for a network’s performance.
The underlying VM determines how secure the record keeping and how accessible it is to devs, not how fast it does it. Check the profiles…
The language you talk to the VM is tailored to the idiosyncracies of a blockchain’s state model…Even if we deployed a RISC-V runtime for Ethereum based blockchain and let people write Rust contracts, they’d look super different to Solana Rust.
Why? Because you always need a way to interact with the chain via syscalls to write and read to the database outside of the VM! And that is specific to the chain’s state model.
Why? Because blockchains are just decentralized record keepers.
Most of the time is spent doing…record keeping!
And some light math, but not too much (think an options pricing algo, not a 70B LLM).
Focus on the security and the usability for the devs! The performance comes from other tradeoffs around network topology and accessibility to node operators!