A place for talking about the Ethereum Virtual Machine on Farcaster.

Optimizing my first serious L2 contracts has been a journey:

1) Dev: your intuitions are all wrong now.
2) Testnet: cheap L2 gas, cheap L1 calldata. Many tools overestimate L2 gas and it can outweigh calldata unlike IRL.
3) Mainnet: cheap L2 gas, L1 calldata is 20-100x testnet cost. Calldata costs dominate everything.

I'm eth newbie..just learning
(working on @farcaster)

terminally.online

My advice to others would be to 1) profile calldata during development as a proxy for total cost, the same way you're used to watching gas and 2) trust only mainnet forks to profile real cost—easy to fool yourself otherwise.

what’s the easy way to profile calldata?

well haha…

i also wonder how does this apply to contract deployment? do we pay for the whole code deployed anyway?

Yes, your contract's initcode is calldata, so you'll pay the L1 calldata cost to store it, just like other tx calldata.