For builders looking to shorten Solidity compilation time, a source article published on November 5, 2026, at 03:05:13 UTC+8 reports a new option: Nomic Foundation’s slang, a compiler independent of solc, available as the hardhat-slang alpha plugin for Hardhat 3. The reported speed gains come with an important limitation: it is not yet suitable for mainnet deployment.
Reported compilation gains
According to the article, benchmarks showed slang compiling an average of 40 times faster than solc in via-IR mode—the compilation path that uses an intermediate representation—and 8.7 times faster in legacy mode. Some repositories saw speedups of up to 79 times.
Those figures concern compilation, not an equivalent acceleration of the entire development workflow. The article says the performance improvement comes mainly from the compilation stage, while test execution time is similar to forge.
Architecture and version support
Slang uses its own compiler front end, an MLIR intermediate layer and an LLVM back end. It supports Solidity versions 0.8.0 and later, with a single binary capable of compiling across multiple versions.
What the alpha does—and does not—establish
The article reports that valid code can currently be compiled reliably and that approximately 99.97% of Sourcify tests pass. However, error diagnostics and code validation remain incomplete. Those limitations mean the alpha should not be treated as ready for mainnet deployment, despite its reported compilation performance.
Original article — published November 5, 2026, at 03:05:13 UTC+8.