Yakovenko, who is the engineering brains of Solana, firstly noted Rust’s popularity. “​It’s not like we picked Haskell or something,” he joked (a dig at Solana’s rival blockchain, Cardano, currently ranked 6th on CoinMarketCap, which did choose Haskell). He went on to explain why they didn’t choose to build with Solidity https://thenewstack.io/solana-rust-developers/