Ethereum Devs Get Boost with New Compiler Backend and Solidity Update

Ethereum developers have two new reasons to update their toolchains after the Nomic Foundation and Solidity team released major updates in September 2026. The Nomic Foundation launched slang-solx, a new LLVM-based Solidity compiler backend, on September 7. This new compiler is up to 5 times faster than the traditional solc compiler when running in via-IR mode.

The core Solidity team released version 0.8.37 three days later, which includes two bug fixes and support for the SLOTNUM opcode tied to the Amsterdam EVM version. This release fills a gap in the ongoing protocol upgrades on Ethereum.

The Nomic Foundation's slang-solx is currently positioned for development use rather than production and should be evaluated by protocols and teams building on Ethereum for their development environments. Once it matures, it may be used in production environments as well.