eBPF allows user-defined programs to run in the kernel.
This is huge for performance-sensitive code that executes against network packets: you don't have to context switch between kernel space and user space.
It's worth pointing out Solana's extreme competitive advantage over other chains is almost entirely due to it running on a variant of eBPF. †
This is an order-of-magnitude leap over other implementations and essentially the way you should do it, if you were to write it from scratch, aside from special purpose hardware fabrication.
† The second reason Solana is so fast is extreme parallelism: all accounts that are used in a transaction must be marked as either "read-only" or "writeable" before sending the transaction, allowing the runtime to parallelize all reads and only solve write contention when necessary.
This is huge for performance-sensitive code that executes against network packets: you don't have to context switch between kernel space and user space.
It's worth pointing out Solana's extreme competitive advantage over other chains is almost entirely due to it running on a variant of eBPF. †
This is an order-of-magnitude leap over other implementations and essentially the way you should do it, if you were to write it from scratch, aside from special purpose hardware fabrication.
† The second reason Solana is so fast is extreme parallelism: all accounts that are used in a transaction must be marked as either "read-only" or "writeable" before sending the transaction, allowing the runtime to parallelize all reads and only solve write contention when necessary.