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The most popular framework for building Solana programs in Rust. Anchor provides macros (#[program], #[account], #[derive(Accounts)]) that auto-generate boilerplate for account validation, serialization, discriminators, and error handling. It includes a CLI (anchor init/build/test/deploy), IDL generation, and TypeScript client generation. Reduces program code by ~80% compared to native development.
The fundamental data storage unit on Solana. Every piece of state is stored in an account identified by a 32-byte public key. Accounts hold a lamport balance, an owner program, a data byte array (up to 10MB), and an executable flag. Only the owning program can modify an account's data, but anyone can credit lamports to it.
A single operation within a transaction that invokes a program. An instruction specifies: (1) the program ID to call, (2) an array of account metas (pubkey, is_signer, is_writable), and (3) an opaque data byte array. Programs decode the instruction data to determine which operation to perform.
An account address derived deterministically from a program ID and a set of seeds, with no corresponding private key. PDAs are created by finding a pubkey that does NOT lie on the Ed25519 curve (using a bump seed). Since there's no private key, only the deriving program can sign for the PDA via invoke_signed, making PDAs ideal for program-controlled state.
A mechanism for one program to call another program's instructions during execution. CPIs enable composability—e.g., a DeFi program can call the Token Program to transfer tokens. CPI depth is limited to 4 levels. The caller passes accounts and instruction data, and the callee runs with the same transaction context.
Interface Definition Language—a JSON specification that describes a program's instructions, accounts, types, and error codes. Anchor auto-generates the IDL from the program source code. Client libraries (TypeScript, Python) use the IDL to serialize/deserialize instruction data and accounts, enabling type-safe interaction without manual encoding.
An 8-byte identifier prepended to account data and instruction data to distinguish types. Anchor computes it as the first 8 bytes of `sha256('account:<AccountName>')` for accounts and `sha256('global:<function_name>')` for instructions. Discriminators prevent type cosplay attacks by ensuring data is deserialized as the correct type.
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Understand how Solana executes work before you optimize or debug it.