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.

Also the fact that different L2s have different calldata optimization/compression, and also all of this is going to drastically change post-4844. It's weird profiling L2 contract costs with so many temporal caveats "today it'll cost X, in a few months probably Y, in a year probably 1/100 of that"

Anything that reduces nonzero calldata bytes will have the biggest impact. The techniques in @msolomon.eth's repo here are all good: https://github.com/ScopeLift/l2-optimizoooors

Make assumptions that avoid passing args like reading defaults or values from storage, use packed encodings, use custom selectors.

Founder /kiwi-news, a decentralized Hacker News

what did u have to change specifically to make the biggest optimization gains?

It's a fun little change up to think about calldata compression more.

Thoughts on optimizing for L1 calldata now and then after 4844, L1 calldata costs plummet? Rewrite?