Offchain Labs announced in a blog post that Stylus is set to launch later in 2023. Dubbed EVM+, Stylus is Arbitrum's next-gen programming environment aimed at enhancing the development of decentralized applications with interoperability features. The initiative seeks to empower a million developers to serve a billion users, leveraging WebAssembly smart contracts. Developers can choose their preferred programming languages, such as C, C++, or Rust, among others.

The vision includes transitioning Web2 languages to Arbitrum Nova and Arbitrum One, a plan now set to accelerate. Stylus promises a 10x performance boost over the previous Nitro Upgrade, making decentralized applications faster than those written in Solidity. The key advantage is interoperability, allowing developers to work across various networks like Ethereum without choosing between them.

The community has welcomed Stylus, anticipating its support for protocols requiring more labor and services solutions. Stylus aims to provide EVM equivalence for general-purpose roll-up technology, enhancing the ecosystem of decentralized applications and protocols.

Stylus simplifies development by enabling developers to use a single language without needing to learn new ones. Decentralized applications written in Stylus will be interoperable regardless of the language used. Additionally, Stylus lowers transaction fees, encouraging the development of high-compute blockchain applications such as decentralized gaming, DAOs, and DeFi.

Stylus will be integrated into Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova, enhancing efficiency and enabling users to create specialized smart contracts, or precompiles, that perform tasks like computing hashes. Ethereum researchers will benefit from Stylus by designing and iterating on EIP compiles without setting up testnets.

Further details about Stylus will be shared on Offchain Labs' Twitter and Discord channels. The final integration is expected later this year. Notably, Stylus is intended to complement, not replace, the EVM, facilitating more efficient development.