前言

Zero-knowledge proofs have emerged as a transformative technology in the blockchain space, offering solutions for both privacy and scalability challenges. Among these, STARKs (Scalable Transparent ARguments of Knowledge) stand out as a particularly powerful innovation. Unlike traditional proof systems, STARKs rely solely on collision-resistant hash functions, making them post-quantum secure and eliminating the need for trusted setups.

However, writing general-purpose programs that can generate cryptographic proofs has historically been a significant challenge. Developers needed deep expertise in cryptography and complex mathematical concepts to create verifiable computations, making it impractical for mainstream adoption.

This is where Cairo comes in. As a general-purpose programming language designed specifically for creating provable programs, Cairo abstracts away the underlying cryptographic complexities while maintaining the full power of STARKs. Strongly inspired by Rust, Cairo has been built to help you create provable programs without requiring specific knowledge of its underlying architecture, allowing you to focus on the program logic itself.

想在Starknet上部署合约的区块链开发者将使用Cairo编程语言来编写他们的智能合约。这允许Starknet操作系统生成交易的执行跟踪，以供证明者生成证明，然后在更新Starknet的状态根之前在Ethereum L1上由验证者验证该证明。

However, Cairo is not only for blockchain developers. As a general purpose programming language, it can be used for any computation that would benefit from being proved on one computer and verified on other machines. Powered by a Rust VM, and a next-generation prover, the execution and proof generation of Cairo programs is blazingly fast - making Cairo the best tool for building provable applications.

本书是为对编程概念有基本了解的开发人员设计的。它是一本友好而平易近人的书本，旨在帮助你提高你的Cairo知识水平，同时也帮助你提高你的通用编程技能。因此，请潜下心来，并准备好学习所有关于Cairo的知识!

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the help of the Cairo community. We would like to thank every contributor for their contributions to this book!

We would like to thank the Rust community for the Rust Book, which has been a great source of inspiration for this book. Many examples and explanations have been adapted from the Rust Book to fit the Cairo programming language, as the two languages share many similarities.