Building Solana Programs with Anchor

After years of building on both EVM and Solana, Anchor has become my go-to framework for Solana program development. Here’s what I’ve learned shipping production programs.

Why Anchor?

Writing raw Solana programs means manual account deserialization, instruction parsing, and security checks. Anchor abstracts most of this while keeping you close to the metal:

• Declarative account validation — define constraints with #[account] macros
• Automatic (de)serialization — Borsh under the hood, zero boilerplate
• Built-in security checks — signer, owner, and PDA validation out of the box

Project Structure

An Anchor project has a clean layout:

programs/
  my_program/
    src/lib.rs      # Program logic
tests/
  my_program.ts     # Integration tests
Anchor.toml         # Config

PDAs Are Everything

Program Derived Addresses are the backbone of Solana program architecture. I use them extensively for multi-sig wallets and escrow patterns:

#[account(
    init,
    payer = authority,
    space = 8 + Vault::INIT_SPACE,
    seeds = [b"vault", authority.key().as_ref()],
    bump
)]
pub vault: Account<'info, Vault>,

The seeds ensure deterministic, collision-free addresses tied to specific authorities.

CPI Integrations

Cross-Program Invocations let you compose with DeFi protocols. I’ve integrated with Orca, Raydium, and Jupiter — the key is getting the account structs right:

let cpi_ctx = CpiContext::new(
    ctx.accounts.jupiter_program.to_account_info(),
    jupiter::Route {
        token_program: ctx.accounts.token_program.to_account_info(),
        // ... remaining accounts
    },
);

Testing

Always write integration tests that hit a local validator. Unit tests alone miss account validation bugs that only surface on-chain.

const tx = await program.methods
  .initialize()
  .accounts({ vault, authority: wallet.publicKey })
  .rpc();

Anchor’s TypeScript client gives you type-safe access to every instruction and account in your program.