Stylus vs Solidity Benchmark Suite

Performance comparison of Rust-based Stylus contracts vs their Solidity equivalents on Arbitrum. Measures gas consumption, execution time, and code size across industry-standard contract primitives.

Status

• Milestone 1: Ownable + AccessControl
• Milestone 2: ERC-20 + ERC-721
• Milestone 3: ERC-1155 + ERC-6909
• Milestone 4: ERC-2981 + ERC-1967 Proxy
• Milestone 5: Beacon Proxy + EIP-712
• Milestone 6 contracts: ECDSA + Token Vesting (final comprehensive report pending)

Structure

contracts/
  solidity/
    src/access/      Ownable.sol, AccessControl.sol
    src/token/       ERC20.sol, ERC721.sol, ERC1155.sol, ERC6909.sol
    src/common/      ERC2981.sol
    src/proxy/       ERC1967Proxy.sol (+ CounterLogic), BeaconProxy.sol (+ UpgradeableBeacon)
    src/utils/       EIP712.sol, ECDSA.sol
    src/finance/     VestingWallet.sol
    test/            correctness tests (*.t.sol) + Benchmark.t.sol (isolated gas/time)
    foundry.toml     pinned solc 0.8.24, optimizer 200 runs
  stylus/
    Cargo.toml       workspace root
    access/          ownable/, access-control/
    token/           erc20/, erc721/, erc1155/, erc6909/
    common/          erc2981/
    proxy/           erc1967/, counter-logic/, upgradeable-beacon/, beacon-proxy/
    utils/           eip712/, ecdsa/
    finance/         vesting-wallet/
scripts/
  benchmark.sh       combined Solidity + Stylus benchmark runner
reports/             per-milestone data and findings

Methodology

Each contract is implemented in both Solidity (OpenZeppelin patterns) and Rust (Stylus SDK). Implementations are functionally equivalent — same interface, same events, same error selectors.

Three metrics per operation:

• Gas: Foundry gas reports (Solidity), transaction receipts via cast (Stylus on-chain)
• Execution time: per-test wall-clock duration from forge test --json, median of 3 runs
• Code size: forge build --sizes (Solidity runtime bytecode) vs wc -c on WASM binaries (Stylus, pre-compression)

Running benchmarks

# Solidity only (no Docker needed)
./scripts/benchmark.sh

# Solidity + Stylus on-chain (requires Nitro devnode)
./scripts/benchmark.sh --stylus

Building

Solidity

cd contracts/solidity
forge build
forge test
forge test --gas-report

Stylus

cd contracts/stylus
cargo build --release --target wasm32-unknown-unknown --workspace

Stylus on-chain benchmarks

Requires Docker and a local Nitro devnode. ERC-1155 compresses above the default 24 KB EIP-170 limit; start the devnode with a raised contract size:

git clone https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro-devnode.git
cd nitro-devnode && ./run-dev-node.sh --contract-size 128000
# then in another terminal:
./scripts/benchmark.sh --stylus

On macOS, Colima with the Apple Virtualization backend works in place of Docker Desktop:

colima start --vm-type=vz

Stylus tests

Unit tests are in each Rust contract's lib.rs behind #[cfg(test)]. They exercise error variants and validation logic and run on the host with cargo test --workspace --lib. Full storage/interaction tests require motsu (the Stylus unit-test framework), which needs a compatible Rust compiler version and is not currently wired in. End-to-end interaction tests run against the Nitro devnode via ./scripts/benchmark.sh --stylus.

Requirements

• Foundry (forge, solc 0.8.24)
• Rust + wasm32-unknown-unknown target (rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown)
• Docker (for Stylus on-chain benchmarks only)