what's Pinocchio?

Pinocchio is a lightweight, dependency-free Rust library designed as a replacement for the solana-program crate, enabling developers to create highly efficient on-chain programs for the Solana blockchain. By leveraging zero-copy types and direct byte array handling for program inputs, it minimizes compute unit (CU) consumption and reduces binary sizes, allowing for optimized performance without the overhead of traditional Solana SDK dependencies. This makes it ideal for fine-tuned applications where compute efficiency is critical, such as token programs or complex DeFi logic. The library is unopinionated, giving developers full control over program structure, unlike frameworks like Anchor. It requires manual handling of client-side interactions but integrates with tools like Shank for IDL generation. Developed by Anza, Pinocchio exemplifies Solana's push for scalability, with examples like p-tokens demonstrating up to 95% CU savings compared to SPL standards, fostering faster and cheaper transactions on the network.

Pinocchio is becoming a standard tool for Solana development, alongside LiteSVM and Mollusk.