Rust Programs
Native Rust smart contract development for Solana without Anchor.
While Anchor is recommended for most programs, native Rust development gives you maximum control and minimal overhead. This is important for programs where compute efficiency is critical.
Program Entry Point
Every Solana program has a single entrypoint function that receives the program ID, accounts, and instruction data. Use the solana_program crate for core types and utilities.
Account Deserialization
Without Anchor's macros, you manually deserialize account data using borsh or custom binary parsing. This gives you full control over the data layout but requires more code.
Security Checks
Without Anchor's automatic validation, you must manually implement all security checks: signer verification, account ownership checks, PDA seed verification, and discriminator checks. Missing any of these can create critical vulnerabilities.
Compute Optimization
Native programs can be significantly more compute-efficient than Anchor programs because you avoid the overhead of Anchor's account validation and serialization. For programs that need to fit within tight compute budgets, native Rust is worth the additional development effort.
Cross-Program Invocations
Use invoke() for CPIs that don't require PDA signing, and invoke_signed() for CPIs where your program needs to sign for a PDA. Always validate the program ID of the program you're invoking.