Install cadence with Homebrew, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• cadence

Project history

The Cadence repository says the language has been open source since 2019 and is the native smart contract language of Flow. Official docs present it as a high-level language created to make digital assets first-class resources: values can be moved but not accidentally copied, lost, or implicitly destroyed.

Cadence draws syntax and safety ideas from Swift, Kotlin, Rust, TypeScript, Solidity, Move, and design-by-contract traditions while targeting Flow's account-storage model. The v1.0.0 release states that Cadence 1.0 culminated five years of work since inception, with no more planned breaking changes, full forward compatibility, entitlements, attachments, and storage/performance improvements.

Adoption history

Cadence adoption follows Flow adoption: developers use it to write and deploy Flow smart contracts, transactions, and scripts. The README points users to the browser playground, Flow CLI, Flow emulator, VS Code extension, Cadence language reference, and Flow developer portal.

Flow ecosystem examples in the README include consumer applications such as NBA Top Shot, NFL All Day, Disney Pinnacle, and Ticketmaster NFT ticketing, making Cadence notable as a domain-specific package for production blockchain applications rather than a general-purpose language runtime.

How it is used

Package users typically install the cadence command to run, parse, test, or work with Cadence code locally, while end-to-end Flow development usually also involves Flow CLI, the emulator, contracts, transactions, and the Cadence Playground. The language itself is used for smart contracts and transaction code stored and executed on Flow.

Why package nerds care

Cadence is interesting to package nerds because it packages a language implementation for a blockchain runtime, not just a compiler. It brings together parser, interpreter/runtime, language server and tooling expectations, versioned language migrations, and network compatibility concerns around Flow's on-chain execution model.

Timeline

• 2019: Cadence is open sourced and begins as Flow's resource-oriented smart contract language.
• 2022: v0.24 Secure Cadence becomes a major pre-1.0 milestone referenced by the v1.0 release.
• 2024-09-26: Cadence v1.0.0 is released, marking no more planned breaking changes.
• 2026: README reports Cadence 1.0 live on Flow mainnet with v1.10.x releases.

Related projects

• Related projects include the Flow network, Flow CLI, Flow emulator, Cadence Playground, the VS Code Cadence extension, Atree storage library, and Flow Improvement Proposals. Conceptually, Cadence is often compared with Solidity and Move.

Sources

• https://cadence-lang.org/docs
• https://cadence-lang.org/docs/language
• https://github.com/onflow/cadence#readme
• https://github.com/onflow/cadence/releases/tag/v1.0.0
• source_facts.package-manager