What is the best alternative to C++?

Question

Ad

Help millions of people make better decisions.

Each month, over 1.7 million people use Slant to find the best products and share their knowledge. Pick the tags you’re passionate about to get a personalized feed and begin contributing your knowledge.

score 253 · Answer 1

C

All

31

Pros

Subtle errors can render the entire program "undefined" by the complicated C standard. The standard imposes no requirements in such cases. Thus C compiler is free to ignore the existence of such cases and Bad Things are prone to happen instead. Even experts can't reliably avoid undefined cases in C, so how can beginners be expected to do so? C allows for non-type safe operations such as logic errors, wild pointers, buffer overflow, etc. UB and type safety issues create a large number of bugs and security vulnerabilities. See More

Top Con

Only offers basic support for source code split into multiple files

Modern programming languages are capable of compiling split source code files by concatenating them together efficiently at compile time before compiling them. However, C requires the developer to resort to messing with header files and makefiles to get similar functionality. See More

Specs

Price:Depends on Implementation, usually free

Standard:ISO/IEC 9899:2011/Cor 1:2012 or C11

See All

253 131

score 756 · Answer 2

Python

All

35

Pros

Do something visually interesting in minutes by using the turtle standard library package. https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/turtle.html Turtle graphics is a popular way for introducing programming to kids. It was part of the original Logo programming language developed by Wally Feurzig and Seymour Papert in 1966. Imagine a robotic turtle starting at (0, 0) in the x-y plane. After an import turtle, give it the command turtle.forward(15), and it moves (on-screen!) 15 pixels in the direction it is facing, drawing a line as it moves. Give it the command turtle.right(25), and it rotates in-place 25 degrees clockwise. Turtle can draw intricate shapes using programs that repeat simple moves. Example Turtle Star Drawing from turtle import * color('red', 'yellow') begin_fill() while True: forward(200) left(170) if abs(pos()) < 1: break end_fill() done() See More

Top Pro

Has features of both high and low level language

It is somewhere between C and Java. See More

Top Pro

Static typing via mypy

Python's syntax supports optional type annotations for use with a third-party static type checker, which can catch a certain class of bugs at compile time. This also makes it easier for beginners to gradually transition to statically typed languages instead of wrestling with the compiler from the start. See More

Specs

Current stable version:3.7.0 and 2.7.15

GZipped size:22.5MB

Language type:Interpreted

See All

756 185

score 211 · Answer 3

C#

All

18

Pros

With .NET core it is a truly universal programming language which support desktop apps (Windows), Mobile apps (Xamarin), Web Apps (ASP.Core MVC). Also is perfectly fit to serverless programming for micro services. Soon it will be also support Web assembly (Blazor). See More

Specs

Price:Free

Current stable version:7

See All

211 110

score 230 · Answer 4

Golang

Current stable version:1.9.2

GZipped size:16MB

Author:Google and Ken Thompson

See All

230 83

score 157 · Answer 5

Kotlin

Kotlin has been designed and built by developers who have an industrial background and not an academic one. As such, it tries to solve issues mostly found in industrial settings. For example, the Kotlin type system helps developers avoid null pointer exceptions. Reasearch languages usually do not have null at all, but APIs and large codebases usually need null. See More

Specs

Price:Free, Open Source

Site:http://kotlinlang.org

Current stable version:1.2

See All

157 50

score 187 · Answer 6

Rust

Current stable version:1.26.0

See All

187 100

score 200 · Answer 7

Haskell

All

24

Pros

Makes categorical higher order abstractions easy to use and natural to the language See More

Specs

Site:https://www.haskell.org/

See All

200 81

score 377 · Answer 8

JavaScript

All

43

Pros

Because it runs in many different environments, it is the most used language in the world. See More

Specs

Engine:V8/ChakraCore

Author:Ryan Dahl/Joyent

Version(LTS):8.x

Minimum Supported ECMAScript Version:ECMAScript 6 (Node v4.x-v10.x)

See All Specs >

See All

377 193

score 258 · Answer 9

Java

All

19

Pros

Checked exceptions add significantly to the cognitive load of the beginner. The more rules unrelated to the actual task that you pile onto the beginner, the slower he gets. Exponentially. And for what? Sure, they look good on paper, but checked exceptions are useless in the real world. They don't scale. When you're calling APIs five levels deep and your method's throws clause balloons to 80 exceptions you might see, it gets kind of ridiculous. So you just say throws Exception, which defeats the whole feature, but is more pointless boilerplate in an already tediously verbose language. Or worse, while developing you can't be bothered and just catch{} and silently swallow them all. Then you forget about it. Now you don't even have exceptions. The cure is worse than the disease! So the wiser Java programmers will wrap all checked exceptions into a runtime exception, effectively making exceptions unchecked. That's at the cost of more boilerplate, but it's the lesser of evils. Unfortunately, Java doesn't even have macros to do this part for you. Maybe your IDE can write code templates for you, but that doesn't make it any easier to read. See More

Top Con

Enforces some misguided principles

Java utilizes principles that organize code into "classes" as the central concept, instead of more familiar organizational methods. See More

Specs

Price:Open source (free)

Site:https://www.java.com

Current stable version:10

See All

258 147

score 185 · Answer 10

Haxe

You should use externs when calling non Haxe code, but if you just need to call one or two external JS functions, you can skip type checking by calling untyped code. See More

Specs

Price:Free, Open Source

Site:https://haxe.org/

Current stable version:3.4.4

See All

185 50

score 247 · Answer 11

Elm

Luckily you do not have to learn Haskell to be able to do any Elm. It is meant to be a language that compiles to Javascript, so for Javascript programmers (Front end) not for CS students who want to learn as many different algorithms as possible. See More

Specs

Price:Open Source

Site:http://elm-lang.org/

Current stable version:0.18

GZipped size:23.2 kB

See All

247 78

score 87 · Answer 12

Nim

Nim has "asyncdispatch" module, which allows you to write async applications. See More

Specs

License:MIT

CPU:All CPU architectures that have an ANSI C compiler

OS:Windows, MacOS/iOS, Linux /Android/Termux, BSD, Solaris/SmartOS, HaikuOS, lots of others

Site:https://nim-lang.org

See All Specs >

See All

87 32

score 207 · Answer 13

Clojure

Current stable version:1.9

GZipped size:3.7Mb, requires JAVA

See All

207 69

score 230 · Answer 14

TypeScript

Specs

Price:Free, Open source

Site:http://www.typescriptlang.org/

Current stable version:2.3

See All

230 90

score 110 · Answer 15

Lua

score 113 · Answer 16

Pascal / Object Pascal

All

25

Pros

It was developed as a teaching language and it shows. No syntax pitfalls and gently encourages good style. See More

Top Pro

Reliable language and code base

Most code from the Turbo Pascal days in the 80s still compiles, yet the language has since been adapted and extended with modern concepts, introducing OOP and interfaces, exception handling, native Unicode support, anonymous methods, generics, ARC and more. See More

Specs

Price:Depends on Implementation

Standard:ISO/IEC 7185:1990 Pascal and ISO/IEC 10206:1990 Extended Pascal

See All

113 38

score 197 · Answer 17

Elixir

Write code that writes code with Elixir macros. Macros make metaprogramming possible and define the language itself. See More

Specs

Price:Open source (Free)

Site:https://elixir-lang.org

Current stable version:1.6

GZipped size:3.61 MB (without required Erlang VM)

See All

197 62

score 43 · Answer 18

Ceylon

If you don't use platform-specific features, you can reuse the same code in your backend server (be it in Java or JavaScript) and in your client-side browser code, for example for storing data, validating input etc. See More

Specs

Price:Free, Open Source

Site:http://ceylon-lang.org

Current stable version:1.3.2

See All

43 19

score 94 · Answer 19

F#

Site:http://www.fsharp.org

Current stable version:4.1

IDE Support:Visual Studio, Code, Rider

See All

94 39

score 184 · Answer 20

Scala

Specs

Price:Open Source (Free)

Site:scala-lang.org

Current stable version:2.12.4

See All

184 101