Glossary
Solana BPF Runtime
Solana's bytecode VM — a sandboxed eBPF variant ("Solana BPF" / SBF) that runs compiled Rust or C programs with strict deterministic execution rules.
Solana programs (smart contracts) compile to a BPF-like bytecode that the validator executes inside a sandboxed VM. The runtime enforces strict resource limits (compute units, account size, stack), deterministic arithmetic, and explicit syscalls into runtime services.
The model gives Solana its single-threaded performance baseline: no JIT-style interpretation overhead, predictable execution, and parallelization at the runtime layer (Sealevel) rather than per- transaction. The new SVM (Solana Virtual Machine) standard generalizes the runtime so other chains can embed it.