pinocchio-development

Pinocchio Development Guide

Build blazing-fast Solana programs with Pinocchio - a zero-dependency, zero-copy framework that delivers 88-95% compute unit reduction and 40% smaller binaries compared to traditional approaches.

Overview

Pinocchio is Anza's minimalist Rust library for writing Solana programs without the heavyweight solana-program crate. It treats incoming transaction data as a single byte slice, reading it in-place via zero-copy techniques.

Performance Comparison

Metric	Anchor	Native (solana-program)	Pinocchio
Token Transfer CU	~6,000	~4,500	~600-800
Binary Size	Large	Medium	Small (-40%)
Heap Allocation	Required	Required	Optional
Dependencies	Many	Several	Zero*

*Only Solana SDK types for on-chain execution

When to Use Pinocchio

Use Pinocchio When:

• Building high-throughput programs (DEXs, orderbooks, games)
• Compute units are a bottleneck
• Binary size matters (program deployment costs)
• You need maximum control over memory
• Building infrastructure (tokens, vaults, escrows)

Consider Anchor Instead When:

• Rapid prototyping / MVPs
• Team unfamiliar with low-level Rust
• Complex account relationships
• Need extensive ecosystem tooling
• Audit timeline is tight (more auditors know Anchor)

Quick Start

1. Project Setup

# Cargo.toml
[package]
name = "my-program"
version = "0.1.0"
edition = "2021"

[lib]
crate-type = ["cdylib", "lib"]

[features]
default = []
bpf-entrypoint = []

[dependencies]
pinocchio = "0.10"
pinocchio-system = "0.4"      # System Program CPI helpers
pinocchio-token = "0.4"       # Token Program CPI helpers
bytemuck = { version = "1.14", features = ["derive"] }

[profile.release]
overflow-checks = true
lto = "fat"
codegen-units = 1
opt-level = 3

2. Basic Program Structure

use pinocchio::{
    account_info::AccountInfo,
    entrypoint,
    program_error::ProgramError,
    pubkey::Pubkey,
    ProgramResult,
};

// Declare entrypoint
entrypoint!(process_instruction);

pub fn process_instruction(
    program_id: &Pubkey,
    accounts: &[AccountInfo],
    instruction_data: &[u8],
) -> ProgramResult {
    // Route instructions by discriminator (first byte)
    match instruction_data.first() {
        Some(0) => initialize(accounts, &instruction_data[1..]),
        Some(1) => execute(accounts, &instruction_data[1..]),
        _ => Err(ProgramError::InvalidInstructionData),
    }
}