Solana, being developed after Ethereum, is built from the learnings of Ethereum and first principles. It is designed for mass adoption with features like high throughput, low fees and better composability, resulting in a faster, more scalable and energy efficient platform.

Account Model Design

The account model is perhaps the biggest differentiator between Solana and Ethereum, significantly impacting how developers build applications:

• Ethereum: Uses an account-based model where state is stored within smart contracts
• Solana: Separates programs (code) from accounts (state), enabling greater composability

This design choice in Solana enables powerful features like the Token Program, where a single program can handle multiple token types, unlike Ethereum where each ERC20 token requires a new contract deployment.

Transaction Parallelization

Solana's architecture is built for parallel processing:

Transactions in Solana must explicitly declare all accounts they'll interact with upfront, allowing validators to determine which transactions have non-overlapping account access. This enables multiple transactions to be processed simultaneously as long as they don't share any accounts, resulting in significantly higher throughput compared to Ethereum's sequential processing model.

This is made possible through Solana's parallel runtime (Sealevel), contrasting with Ethereum's sequential execution model.

Developer Experience

Rust language is one reason and the account model is another reason why the developer experience on Solana differs significantly from Ethereum. Rust is chosen for its performance, safety and memory management. Understanding this architectural choice is crucial for developers transitioning between the two platforms.

Learning to write Solana programs (smart contracts) has a steeper learning curve compared to Solidity. Developers need to handle additional responsibilities like:

• Data serialization and deserialization
• Explicit account management
• Account ownership checks
• Program derived addresses (PDAs)

While frameworks like Anchor help abstract away some of this complexity, these considerations stem directly from Solana's fundamental design choices. The tradeoff is clear - increased development complexity in exchange for higher throughput, and lower latency.

However, Solana's architecture also enables powerful composability. The Token Program is a prime example - a single program can handle multiple token types, unlike Ethereum where each ERC20 token requires a new contract deployment.

Final Thoughts

Solana's design philosophy recognizes that hardware capabilities are rapidly advancing. The platform prioritizes performance and scalability through architectural choices that may increase initial development complexity.

Solana noticed that hardware is becoming cheap and fast so rapidly. Also, I remember Solana's founder (Anatoly) saying that software should go fast enough so that we can utilize the growing hardware at its best.

Finally, I believe that these technologies are not about token prices but making people build something extraordinary that is decentralized.

References: Solana vs Ethereum