What Is Foundry?
Also known as: Foundry Toolkit, Forge, Anvil, Foundry Framework
In short
Foundry is an open-source development toolkit written in Rust that brings together tools for compiling, testing, and deploying smart contracts and interacting with the chain for Ethereum and EVM-compatible blockchains.
Foundry consists of several command-line tools: forge compiles, tests, and deploys contracts; cast is used to read data from the chain and send transactions; anvil runs a local test blockchain; and chisel allows trying out Solidity code interactively. The project was started under the crypto-focused investment firm Paradigm and is developed together with the open-source community.
What makes Foundry stand out is that tests are written directly in Solidity instead of JavaScript; this way, the developer works in the same language as the contract. The toolkit offers advanced features such as fuzz tests that look for bugs with random inputs, invariant tests, gas reports, and fork tests that replicate the mainnet's state at a specific block locally. Because it is written in Rust, build and test times are generally short.
Together with Hardhat, it is considered one of the core tools of today's Ethereum development ecosystem; many teams use both tools together in the same project. A significant portion of projects that used Truffle and Ganache, whose development has been discontinued, have also moved to Foundry or Hardhat.
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