Zug, Switzerland, Feb. 09, 2016 – The Ethereum Foundation, a leader in the research and development of blockchain technology and decentralized networks, has announced effective January 15th, 2016 the appointment of Dr. Christian Reitwiessner as Lead Developer and Team Lead for the C++ team.
Disclaimer: This is a press release. Bitcoinist is not responsible for this project.
From Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum, “Christian Reitwiessner is an excellent developer, and has been involved with the Ethereum project for over a year. His development work has been crucial in taking Solidity from Gavin’s initial vision on a github document to a fullyfeatured programming language used by over 100 ethereum applications around the world, and I look forward to more great work from him in his new capacity as lead C++ developer.”
Christian is a blockchain specialist with a PhD in Computational Complexity. Prior to joining Ethereum, he worked for TomTom NV, a Dutch company that produces navigation and mapping products, leading a team responsible for processing road traffic data and taking it into account in routing algorithms on personal navigation devices.
Since joining Ethereum, Christian has created the Ethereum Smart Contract Language, Solidity. Solidity is similar to Javascript and perhaps the first example of a contractoriented programming language. It is designed to compile code for the Ethereum Virtual Machine which lies behind every Smart Contract and DApp (Decentralized Application) running on the Ethereum network.
Regarding the appointment to his new role, Christian comments: “Ethereum is a free software project that anyone is free to use and improve. From what we have seen at our conferences and meetups, there are so many people working on projects on top of Ethereum, but we only have a small team working on the actual platform. Ethereum should be an open project that is inviting for anyone to propose improvements, actually implement them and get them accepted.
As the new C++ team lead, I will do my best to get the entry barrier as low as possible not only for users (DApp developers) but also for developers (platform developers). This is a necessary step, and I am convinced that this is the way software should be developed, especially software that aims to be beneficial to humanity as a whole.
Of course, the community can only support us, we cannot ask anyone to develop an important feature with a deadline in their free time. This is why the core team will focus on the key software components and many other things will be optional. We will drop any work duplicated between the Go and C++ teams unless it is essential for finding consensus bugs and work hard to remove the invisible “language barrier” and bring the teams closer together to function as one cohesive team.
This means our priorities will be Solidity and Mix (the IDE and smart contract debugger), while the C++ implementation of ethereum/web3 (“eth”) will align its interface with the Go implementation Geth, so existing frontends like Mist, the Ethereum wallet, the Geth console and other tools can attach to both backends without changes.
On the other hand, this means that we cannot support the development of the C++ UI AlethZero into a fullyfledged dapp browser and would be happy to see its unique features (mainly the blockchain explorer) being integrated as a DApp into Mist.”
About Ethereum Foundation
The Ethereum Foundation is a nonprofit organization registered in Switzerland, overseeing the resources dedicated to supporting the research and development of Ethereum blockchain technology. Additional information is available on the organization’s website at: www.ethereum.org