What is the best alternative to Vala?

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score 7 · Answer 1

Lobster

Top Pro

Compile time reference counting

Unlike Rust doesn't make the programmer jump through hoops, mainly automatic. Does an analysis similar to the Rust borrow checker to infer lifetimes, but makes life easier on the programmer. See More

Top Con

Small community

Lead doesn't appear to be so ambitious or has a vision to push making more popular. See More

Top Pro

WebAssembly backend

More options for users. See More

Top Con

Compile time reference counting not 100%

Around 5% of time, need to escape to runtime reference counting. Working to get the percentage as low as possible. See More

Top Pro

Python-esque syntax

There's an audience who loves that. See More

Top Con

Lobster not yet totally written in Lobster

Core written in C++. Plans to change that, but has been a long time. See More

Top Pro

Inline structs

Structs are allocated in their parent, and come at zero overhead. See More

Top Con

Python-like syntax, but different use case and domain

Not Python compatible and often significantly different in purpose and use cases. See More

Top Pro

Automatic memory management

Better than Rust. No sadism. See More

Top Pro

Type inference algorithm

Just works. Goes further than most languages in terms of allowing code without types. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS

License:Apache v2

Developer:Wouter van Oortmerssen

Current stable version:v2023

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7 0

score 959 · Answer 2

Go

Top Pro

Simplified C-like syntax that is as easy to read and write as Python

The language is designed in a manner that seems logical. Syntax is simplified to reduce burden on the programmer and compiler developers. See More

Top Con

Golang controlled by Google

Solves Google problems, which might not be your or the majority of user's problems. Was created for the benefit and purposes of Google, so is less flexible in language direction and options. See More

Top Pro

Great team working behind it

Go has a solid team of engineers working on it (some of the best networking engineers in the world are working on Go). Up until now, the great engineering of the language has compensated for its lack of power. See More

Top Con

Hard to abstract even the simplest notions

Go is famously regarded as very simple. However, this simplicity becomes problematic in time. Programmers who use Go find themselves over and over again writing the same thing from a very low point of view. Domains not already served by libraries that are easy to glue are very difficult to get into. See More

Top Pro

Easy to install and configure; simple to compile software

Go software can be immediately installed, regardless of your operating system, package manager, or processor architecture with the go get command. Software is compiled statically by default so there is no need to worry about software dependencies on the client system. Makefiles and headers are no longer necessary, as the package system automatically resolves dependencies, downloads source code and compiles via a single command: go build. See More

Top Con

Forces K&R style and won't allow Allman style

Golang developers were extremely short-sighted and biased by forcing the K&R style, which should never have happened. Basically kicking Allman style users out of their language. See More

Top Pro

Programmers don't have to argue over what 10% subet of the language to implement in their software project

The language promotes programming in a specific idiomatic style, which helps keep every programmer on the same page. See More

Top Con

Doesn't have true enums

Golang does weirdness with const versus having real enums, like other languages. This reflects the stubbornness and shortsightedness of the core developers, similar to the issue with generics, where it was denied that it was needed until it became too obvious that it should have been added years ago. See More

Top Pro

Supports 'modules' in the form of packages

Every Go source file contains a package line that indicates which package a file belongs to. If the name of the package is 'main', it indicates that this is a program that will be compiled into a binary. Otherwise, it will recognize that it is a package. See More

Top Con

Does not have sum types

Makes it harder to have functions of different parameters types in a non OOP language. Thus messy generics and interfaces, and more confusion, where sum types could have solved a number of issues. See More

Top Pro

Demonstrates a unique, simple concept to object-oriented programming

All types are essentially objects, be they type aliases or structs. The compiler automatically associates types to their methods at compile time. Those methods are automatically associated to all interfaces that match. This allows you to gain the benefits of multiple inheritance without glue code. As a result of the design, classes are rendered obsolete and the resulting style is easy to comprehend. See More

Top Con

It appears Google uses position to snuff out or suppress other languages

Newer languages that could threaten Golang (or other Google controlled languages) appear to have suppressed search results on Google and YouTube. Dangerous situation where large company can manipulate user choice and market share. The freedom to freely choose and user rights need to be protected. See More

Top Pro

Great language for building networking services

Go was started as a systems language but now it has fully committed in the niche of networking services. This has been a brilliant move by Go because it allows them to capitalize on the immense talent of the Go engineering team (who are in the most part network engineers). In a world dominated by Java EE and slow scripting language, Go was a breath of fresh air and it continues to be one of the most powerful languages if you want to build networking services. See More

Top Con

Designed to make the programmer expendable

Go was designed for large team projects where many contributors may be incompetent. That Go can still get things done under these conditions is a testament to its utility in this niche. Go's infamously weak abstraction power is thus a feature, not a bug, meant to prevent your teammates from doing too much damage. This also means any team member can be easily replaced by another code monkey at minimum cost. Good for the company, bad for you. The more talented programmers, on the other hand, will be very frustrated by having one hand tied behind their back. See More

Top Pro

Exceptionally simple and scalable multithreaded and concurrent programming

Goroutines are "lightweight threads" that runs on OS threads. They provide a simple way for concurrent operations — prepending a function with go will execute it concurrently. It utilizes channels for communication between goroutines which aids to prevent races and makes synchronizing execution effortless across goroutines. The maximum number of OS threads goroutines can run on may be defined at compile time with the GOMAXPROCS variable. See More

Top Con

Easy to shadow variable

Due to single character only difference, declare and assign statement can easily shadow variable from outer scope unconsciously. Example: err := nil if xxx { err := somefunctionthatreturnsanerr } return err // always return nil See More

Top Pro

The go compiler compiles binaries instantly — as fast as a scripting language interpreter

Compiled binaries are fast — about as fast in C in most cases. Compiles on every OS without effort — truly cross-platform compiler. As a result of the fast compilation speed, you can use the gorun program to use go source code as if it was a scripting language. See More

Top Con

No forms designer

Those who are used to Visual Studio can feel the lack of a forms designer for rapid development. See More

Top Pro

Performance is on the order of C and Java

Go is blazing fast, but easier to write than Python, JS, Ruby, or many other dynamic languages. See More

Top Con

Bizarre syntactic choices like a unique date format.

Top Pro

Jobs available

You can find a Job knowing Go. Which is more than can be said with many other languages. See More

Top Con

Changing visibility requires renaming all over the code

Top Pro

API documentation is rich in content; easy to memorize

Only features deemed critical are added to the language to prevent cruft from working its way into the language. The language is small enough to fit inside one's head without having to repeatedly open documentation. Documentation is hosted on an official webpage in a manner that is simple to read and understand. See More

Top Con

Lacks support for immutable data

Only way to prevent something from being mutated is to make copies of it, and to be very careful to not mutate it. See More

Top Pro

Supports functional programming techniques such as function literals

This naturally also supports first class and high order functions, so you may pass functions as variables to other functions. See More

Top Con

Performance slowdown because of indirect calls and garbage collection

Practically no meaningful Go application can be written without indirect function calls and garbage collection, these are central to Go's core infrastructure. But these are major impediments to achieving good performance. See More

Top Pro

Multiple variables may be assigned on a single line

This conveniently eliminates the need to create temporary variables. Fibonacci example: x, y = y, x+y See More

Top Con

Implementation of interfaces are difficult to figure out

Finding out what interfaces are implemented by a struct requires a magic crystal ball. They are easy to write, but difficult to read and trawl through. See More

Top Pro

Built-in unit testing

The idiomatic approach to writing a Go software project is to perform test-driven development with unit testing. Every source code file should have an associated *_test.go file which tests functions in the code. See More

Top Pro

Provides tools for automatically formatting code for your entire software project

This helps keep every programmer on the same page in a project and eliminates arguments over formatting styles. See More

Top Pro

Automatically generates API documentation for installed packages

Godoc is provided to automatically generate API documentation for Go projects. Godoc also hosts its own self-contained web server that will list documentation for all installed packages in your Go path. See More

Top Pro

Supports splitting source code into multiple files

As long as every source code file in a directory has the same package name, the compiler will automatically concatenate all of the files together during the compilation process. See More

Top Pro

Syntax for exported code from a package is simplified to be less verbose than other languages

Any variable, type and function whose name begins with a capital letter will be exported by a project, while all other code remains private. There is no longer a need to signify that a piece of code is 'private' or 'public' manually. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac etc.

Developer:Google with Ken Thompson, Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike

Current stable version:1.21.0

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959 235

score 503 · Answer 3

C

Top Pro

Understanding of computers

Learning C forces you to grapple with the low-level workings of your computer (memory management, pointers, etc.) in ways that the other languages abstract away. Without an understanding of these low-level aspects of computer programming you will be limited if you try to develop an application that needs to run in a memory or performance constrained environment. Other languages like Python can obscure a lot of details, so your foundation may be weaker. See More

Top Con

Languages is full of corner cases and undefined behaviors

Undefined behavior in a program can cause unexpected results, making it hard to debug. With UB, program behavior may vary wildly depending on optimization settings. There are many cases that invoke UB, such as signed overflow, invalid dereferences, large integer shifts, uninitialized variables, etc. These serve to frustrate novice programmers when they could be learning other concepts. See More

Top Pro

Helps with learning other languages later

A lot of languages used in the industry have a C-like syntax (C++, Java, Javascript, C#, PHP) and starting with C will help new developers to be familiar with it's syntax and by extensions with the syntax of many popular languages. See More

Top Con

Requires memory management

Learning programming is already hard enough when you don't have to worry about memory leaks. See More

Top Pro

Industry standard

C is the industry standard programming language, moreover, it is the most popular programming language to use. C is the language used for most Windows, UNIX and Mac operating systems. See More

Top Con

Completely lacks type safety

The C standard library is not type safe, and the language itself does not promote type safety built into the language, which leads to error-proneness of the language. If anything, it would be recommended that those interested in C to instead put their time in D, which actually includes a complete copy of the C standard library rewritten to be fully type safe. See More

Top Pro

Portable

C is portable between most hardware. Generally a C compiler is made for any new architecture, and already exists for existing architectures. C is portable between all operating systems (Windows, UNIX, Mac, etc.) and only needs a program to be recompiled to work. This allows anyone on any operating system to learn about the language and not be held back by intricacies of their operating system. With this said, C's portability these days is not quite what it used to be. Much of said portability relies on the POSIX standard in particular, and as time passes, the compliance of a given system with that standard is becoming less certain; especially in the case of Linux. Most things will still be portable (or at least emulatable) between Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD for example; but you will at times need to make use of platform-specific support libraries and APIs as well. See More

Top Con

C will require you to learn concepts too advanced for most beginners

While other programmers will learn algorithms and structures and will do magic tricks and awesome applications, you will learn trash info that you should know maybe after 5-7 years experience in software development, not earlier. It's like going the first time as a seven year old kid to first school class, and your teacher tells you to learn you about Discrete Math, without basic math and how to do 2x2. If you wish to be a really good programmer, C for sure will be in your portfolio, but not as a first language, and this programming language is used only for very hard and very limited tools which require a lot of professional skills from the programmer. See More

Top Pro

Must-have

Capability to program in C is greatly appreciated in developers, creates an image of competency, and many programmers will learn it at some point in their careers. See More

Top Con

Does not support modules; header file annoyances

Header files are a poor man's implementation of modules. Modern programming languages make use of modules which eliminate the need for C includes and header files and the many issues caused by them, such as the complete lack of dependency checking. Header files often contain even more include statements that point to other header files which also point to even more which drastically increases compile time. Modules only have to be compiled once, and when importing those modules into your software project, you only have to pull in the module that you are using, which is often times already precompiled. This way, the compiler knows exactly what it needs before beginning to compile your project and can automatically compile the few dependencies it needs in advance rather than recursively compiling every header file it runs across as in C. See More

Top Pro

Low level of abstraction

While higher level languages languages like Java and Python provide possibilities to be "more expressive" per line of code, it's much more convenient to start with "less efficient" (get me right) language, in order to get initial concepts of how things behave at lower level. Actually C is a good starting point moving to both higher and lower levels of abstraction, the good example here would be learning C before Assembler, as for general use the Assembler quite hard to understand due to low level of its abstraction (like getting the understanding on how loops work in C before trying to implement them on Assembler). See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

While the language compliments knowledge of computer components very well, and gives a deeper understanding, it is also quite difficult to learn, and to use correctly, especially without aforementioned knowledge. See More

Top Pro

More control over the code

Top Con

Low-level

Depending on the purpose this can be either a pro or a con. If the task is to learn how to program, low-level of C will impend learning important concepts. Furthermore, C is rather limited in ways of building abstractions. "Low-levelness" of C can be a pro feature in learning system programming. See More

Top Pro

The king of languages, imitated, extended but never equalled

Made of a small set of keywords and rules, only your imagination is the limit. Above all, when it comes to 'pro' programming, C is the only one to rely on. See More

Top Con

Other languages can do it easier or better

There are languages like Rust, Object Pascal, D, Golang, Vlang, Odin, Zig, Jai, etc... that can be used instead. The other languages are easier to understand, use, and/or about as fast. See More

Top Pro

Teaches good practices

Writing in C will require you to understand how things are done. C implies using and understanding the fundamentals. Learning a higher-level language after is much easier. See More

Top Con

Compiles procedurally rather than intelligently

In the same manner that C recursively compiles header files ad infinitum without any sort of dependency checking, C source code is also compiled in the same manner. If you attempt to call a function before it is declared, the compiler will fail because the function was not compiled before it was caled. See More

Top Pro

Portable between CPU architectures

C was designed to be independent of any particular machine architecture, and so with a little care, it is easy to write "portable" programs (see here). By design, C provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions, and therefore it has found lasting use in applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language like operating systems or small embedded systems. See More

Top Con

Lack of support for first class strings

C does not support the string type, nor does it support UTF-8 strings that modern languages are employing today. Instead of strings, C makes use of the *char type which is a pointer to a character array. See More

Top Pro

C is simple with lesser rules than any other language

C is standardized and it is the go-to language when you have to speed things up. See More

Top Con

Arrays are not first class objects

When an array is passed to a function, it is converted to a pointer, even though the prototype confusingly says it's an array. When this conversion happens, all array type information gets lost. C arrays also cannot not be resized, which means that even simple aggregates like a stack are complicated to implement. C arrays also cannot be bounds checked, because they don't know what the array bounds are. See More

Top Pro

Ubiquitous

There is a C compiler available for probably every computer system in existence today. See More

Top Con

Undefined behaviors and weak limited type safety

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 Pro

Easy to drop down to assembly

Sometimes you really need to program directly in assembly. C’s ABI and common compiler extensions make this a piece of cake. See More

Top Con

The need for C developers in the current market is very low, and trending downward

Older languages, like C, are no longer in their hay day. Even if you do learn it as your first language, you are only setting yourself up to need to learn another language in the long run. If you want a skill that you can not only learn from, but also potentially build a career on, C should not be your first choice. See More

Top Pro

If you can't grok C you should not be a professional programmer

It sets an early bar that if you can't hurdle you might as well do something other than programming and not waste any more of your time. See More

Top Con

Isn't truly portable or cross platform

The C programming language is not portable to other operating systems, and even different compilers, because the C language does not provide any reference cross platform libraries or compilers. Different platforms and compilers provide their own implementation of the C standard library which may not be compatible with the implementation in another compiler or platform. Without cross platform libraries and tools, one cannot state that C is portable. This is in stark contrast to modern programming languages that provide their own cross platform libraries and compilers, such as D, Go and Rust. See More

Top Pro

Basic concepts can be applied to accelerate learning any other language

You can easily pivot knowledge learned here and apply it to almost every other language. 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

Top Pro

Foundational, difficult but important

Learning C will teach valuable skills and transferrable understanding of computing. While learning a scripting language may be easier, students will not understand system constraints and performance problems, nor what features like garbage collection are actually doing in other languages. See More

Top Con

C structs are very weak and outdated

C structs lack a lot of modern capabilities that are vital in programming languages of today, such as assigning member functions to structs to give them object-oriented capabilities, constructs, deconstructors and RAII. Great care must be used when using structs in C to prevent memory leaks and ridiculously slow structs. See More

Top Pro

Low level langauge

Top Con

Includes require obscene resources to compile

All the modern languages have resulted in ditching the ancient deprecated model of #include statements and have instead adopted the superior model of modules. When compiling software written in C, the programmer is forced to also compile X headers which contain Y headers which contain Z headers and so forth -- drastically increasing the number of lines that need to be compiled. In order to compile something as simple as "Hello, World", for example, 18K lines of code needs to be compiled. This can be very taxing on RAM and CPU resources, causing compile times to quickly absorb a large portion of the programming process. See More

Top Con

Heavily outdated programming concepts

C lacks a large majority of programming concepts that modern languages make use of today. The existing functionality of C makes use of outdated and deprecated methodologies which can be of great annoyance to the modern day programmer. See More

Specs

Current stable version:C'18

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

Typing discipline:static

Paradigm:imperative

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503 215

score 610 · Answer 4

Rust

Top Pro

Catch errors at compile-time

Since Rust is statically typed, you can catch multiple errors during compile time. This is extremely helpful with debugging, especially compared with dynamically typed languages that may fail silently during runtime. See More

Top Con

Long compile times

Way longer to compile than other languages. See More

Top Pro

Compiles to machine code allowing for extra efficiency

Rust uses LLVM as a backend, among other things this allows Rust code to compile down to machine languages. This allows developers to write programs that run as efficiently as possible. See More

Top Con

Low productivity

The compiler is strict, such as ownership and borrowing checkers. See More

Top Pro

Threads without data races

Unique ownership system guarantees a mutable data to be owned and mutated by only one thread at a time, so there's no data race, and this guarantee is checked at compile time statically. Which means easy multi-threading. Of course, immutable data can be shared among multiple threads freely. See More

Top Con

Low readability

Harder to read and understand language. See More

Top Pro

Generics support

You don't have to write same array and dictionary classes hundreds and thousands times for strong type check by compiler. See More

Top Con

Very ugly and verbose syntax

Compared to many languages. One tool needed to be productive is the language to be pleasing and effective, yet Rust friction is as high as its safety. See More

Top Pro

Built-in concurrency

Rust has built-in support for concurrency. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

Pretty strict and hard to adapt for beginners. See More

Top Pro

Supports cross compilation for different architectures

Since Rust 1.8 you can install additional versions of the standard library for different targets using rustup/multirust. For example: $ rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl Which then allows for: $ cargo build --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl See More

Top Con

Not as useful or productive as advertised.

If really out here wanting to use something besides C/C++, in 98% of use cases, would do just as well or be better off using something other than Rust. Will complete the project faster, would be easier, will be happier, and nearly as safe (use newer language with optional GC). See More

Top Pro

Makes developers write optimal code

Rust is a modern programming language written around systems. It was designed from the ground up this way. It's language design makes developers write optimal code almost all the time, meaning you don't have to fully know and understand the compiler's source code in order to optimize your program. Furthermore, Rust does not copy from memory unnecessarily, to give an example: all types move by default and not copy. Even references to types do not copy by default. In other words, setting a reference to another reference destroys the original one unless it's stated otherwise. See More

Top Con

Rust not as safe as it pretends to be

Rust problems: 1) Massive undisclosed usage of unsafe. 2) Massive amounts of memory safety CVEs - see details. 3) Large bloated Rust binaries increase attack surface for exploits. 4) Many corporate types claiming Rust is safe, don't actually program or use it (have some quiet financial interest to push it). See More

Top Pro

Support for macros

When you identify a part of your code which gets repeated often, which you cannot abstract using functions or classes, you can use Rust's built-in Macros. See More

Top Con

Significant time required to understand the language fully

There's the infamous borrow checker for example. See More

Top Pro

Official package manager and build tool

Cargo is the official package manager for Rust. It comes with the language and downloads dependencies, compiles packages, and makes and uploads distributable packages See More

Top Con

Low-level programming language

This means that it encourages the programmer to be very careful in terms of how memory is allocated, etc. Most applications can run without exceeding the capacity of the server, even with an inefficient dynamic scripting language. See More

Top Pro

Easy to write understandable code

While not as verbose as Java, it still is much more verbose than languages like Go and Python. This means that the code is very explicit and easy to understand. See More

Top Pro

Big community

The biggest community contributing to language. See More

Top Pro

Functional programming

Very easy to create functional with some additional from structure application. See More

Top Pro

Excellent syntax

Top Pro

Safety

Top Pro

No GC

Top Pro

Low memory usage

Top Pro

Static compiled & statically linked single file output

Top Pro

Extremely fast code execution

Top Pro

Zero-cost futures or Async IO

Specs

Platforms:Linux, MacOS X, Windows, BSD

License:MIT/Apache

Current stable version:1.71.1

See All Experiences

610 339

score 490 · Answer 5

Nim

Top Pro

Great metaprogramming features

There are generics, templates, macros in Nim. They can allow you to write new DSL for your application, or avoid all boilerplate stuff. See More

Top Pro

Strict typing

Checks your code at compile time. See More

Top Pro

Has built-in unittest module

With built-in "unittest" module you can create test with a very readable code. See More

Top Pro

Has built-in async support

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

Top Pro

Compile-time execution

Nim has a built-in VM, which executes macros and some other code at compile time. For example, you can check if you're on Windows, and Nim will generate code only for it. See More

Top Pro

Really cross-platform

The same code can be used for web, server, desktop and mobile. See More

Top Pro

Easy to read

Nim has a lot of common with Python in terms of syntax. Indentation-based syntax, for/while loops. See More

Top Pro

Multi paradigm

Imperative, OOP, functional programming in one language. See More

Top Pro

Easy to integrate with another languages

You can use Nim with any language that can be interfaced with C. There's a tool which helps you to create new C and C++ bindings for Nim - c2nim. Also, you can use Nim with Objective C or even JavaScript (if you're compiling for these backends). See More

Top Pro

Garbage-collected

You don't need to deal with all those manual memory allocations, Nim can take care of it. But also you can use another GC, or tweak it for your real-time application or a game. See More

Top Pro

Type interferencing

You only need to specify types in your procedures and objects - you don't need to specify type when you're creating a new variable (unless you're creating it without initialization). See More

Top Pro

Built-in Unicode support

You can use unicode names for variables, there is "unicode" module for operations with unicode. See More

Top Pro

Supports UFCS (Unified Function Call Syntax)

writeLine(stdout, "hello") can be written as stdout.writeLine("hello") proc add(a: int): int = a + 5 can be used like 6.add.echo or 6.add().echo() See More

Specs

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

License:MIT

CPU:All CPU architectures that have an ANSI C compiler or JavaScript interpreter

Current stable version:2.0.0

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490 195

score 188 · Answer 6

D

Top Pro

Has an improved C subset

With few exceptions, D will either compile C code to work exactly as when compiled as C, or it won't compile - it won't quietly change the semantics of C code and give unexpected results. This means that D contains an improved C, as it fails compilation where type safety is missing in C. This allows learning the same machine operations available in C and other low-level languages. See More

Top Con

Poor adoption even after many years of existence

There's a widely accepted perception of D as a language that has been poorly adopted. Since adoption is driven by perception this becomes a fact. So managers and engineers start becoming nervous in adopting a language that has such a perception among the community and that has been so unsuccessful for so long. See More

Top Pro

Easy to read and understand code

Top Con

Failed at becoming alternative to C or C++

Almost as confused and complicated as C++, but without the popularity and widespread corporate usage. Also failed at becoming a good cross-platform GUI application development language like Object Pascal. Many missed past opportunities, and now newer languages are better alternatives. See More

Top Pro

Doesn't force you to deal with memory management

When you're just starting out, dealing with manual memory management and its bugs is a huge pain! D is garbage collected by default, which removes a huge class of things that could go wrong. And later on, if you decide you don't want or need the GC, you can turn it off. See More

Top Con

Lack of vision

D is community-driven and lacks the support of any large corporation. While this increases the amount of talent and engineering abilities of the people working on D, it also brings a severe lack of charisma, leadership and vision. See More

Top Pro

Very fast compilation

D is usually up to 10 times faster than C++. Having a language that compiles this fast means that you are free to write highly optimized code because of the relatively low cost of experimentation. See More

Top Con

Garbage Collection

Memory is not managed directly. See More

Top Pro

Unit testing built-in

D provides unittest blocks to insert code that verifies functions preform their expected behavior and document edge cases. Since these are enabled with a compiler switch, there is no need to teach new programmers how to install new libraries and import modules, instead training on test driven design can start from the very first function. See More

Top Con

All the downsides of garbage collection without any of its benefits

When D decided to implement garbage collection it instantly alienated a large community of developers (C and C++ programmers). For them, the official policy has been: "Don't want garbage collection? Use D with RAII or manual management style!". While true, it's also absolutely pointless because there's little to none support for alternate memory management styles in the standard library, which means that a new user will have to start with a language that is stripped down of the core infrastructure. On the other hand, for those people who want to use garbage collection, the implementation of it is lackluster. See More

Top Pro

Provides a powerful data structure on top of C's arrays called slices

D provides a structure that builds on C's arrays called slices. A slice is a segment of an array that tracks the pointer and the length of the segment. Slices are extremely powerful because they combine the protection of knowing the length of the data with the garbage collector that manages the memory backing that data, thus avoiding most memory corruption issues. See More

Top Pro

It's a state-of-art evolution of C

Top Pro

Static with type inference

For a new user adding types can feel tedious, and takes focus off the meaning of the code, but they are also important for checking logic. D provides static types, and a good system to infer types, so types are checked when calling functions, but do not need to be specified everywhere, making it feel more dynamic. See More

Top Pro

Provable purity and immutability

The compiler can check that functions don't have side effects, extremely important for functional programming in concurrent scenarios, and can check immutability. Therefore, the compiler will prove that your programs are functionally pure and respect immutable data, if you want it to. See More

Top Pro

Compile-time Function Execution

Top Pro

Built-in Unicode support

Top Pro

Industrial quality

Top Pro

Asynchronous I/O that doesn’t get in your way

Because all types can be treated as objects, all files can call functions in the same manner -- even stdin and stdout. stdout.writeln(); stdin.readln(); file.writeln(); file.readln(); See More

Top Pro

Easy to integrate with C and C++

D practically has the same memory structure as C and C++; all D does it build a structure around that. The entire C standard library is accessible at no cost (syntactic or speed) and it's being worked on allowing the same for the C++ standard library. See More

Top Pro

Designed for concurrency and parallelism

Supports first-class functionality for both concurrency and parallelism, offered as part of the standard library. See More

Top Pro

Supports calling functions from types in an object-oriented manner.

if (exists(file)) {} may be written as if (file.exists) {}. writeln(file); may be written as file.writeln(); isDivisibleBy(10, 2); may be written as 10.isDivisibleBy(2); writeln(isEven(add(5, 5))); may be written as 5.add(5).isEven().writeln(); See More

Specs

Current stable version:2.101.2

Site:https://dlang.org/

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188 92

score 93 · Answer 7

OCaml

Top Pro

Actively-developed functional programming language at the forefront of research

Functional programming is based on the lambda calculus. OCaml is in its functional parts almost pure lambda calculus, in a very practical manner: useful for many daily programming tasks. The acitve development makes improvements to the type system like generalized algebraic data types (GADT) or polymorphic variants, so when learning this language you get at once a down to earth usable compiler and advanced abstraction features. See More

Top Con

Strong focus on *nix systems, lacking native support for MS Windows

Lacks native support for Windows systems. See More

Top Pro

Encourages functional style

It steers you towards a functional style, but doesn't bother you with purity and "monads everywhere" like other languages, such as Haskell. See More

Top Pro

No windows!

Strong focus on *nix systems, lacking native support for MS Windows Lacks native support for Windows systems. See More

Top Pro

Sophisticated and easy-to-use package manager

OPAM is a package manager for OCaml, which is really easy to use, just like npm. It creates a .opam folder in home directory. The documentation is great as well, and you can switch between multiple versions of OCaml for each project. You can also package your project and publish it on OPAM repositories, even if the dependencies do not exists on OPAM. See More

Top Pro

One of the best for writing compilers

OCaml is compiled to native binary, so it's amazingly fast. Being a member of ML-family languages, it has expressive syntax for trees, and has great LLVM support. See More

Top Pro

Stable syntax

The syntax is consistent, some syntaxic sugar but at a reasonable level, so reading code of others isn't too much confusing. See More

Top Pro

Strong editor integration

The merlin editor tool provides all you need to develop OCaml in your favourite editor. See More

Specs

License:LGPL version 2.1

OS:Linux, Windows, OSX, BSD

Price:Open source (Free)

Current stable version:4.0.7

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93 51

score 47 · Answer 8

Java

Top Con

Memory hungry

Running the virtual machine, application server and application itself consumes significant amount of resources. See More

Top Pro

Verbosity

It makes it easy to debug and to read code. See More

Top Con

Unnecessarily obtuse and verbose

If you like typing 40 lines of code to open a file, Java is the language for you. If, on the other hand, you’d actually like to get something done, look elsewhere. See More

Top Pro

Mature ecosystem

The language and all its tools have enough time to age and they've aged well. See More

Top Con

Oracle

Enough said. In more detail: Oracle has acquired Java from Sun and continues to surround it with controversy ever since (legendary lawsuit with google, money extortion from the enterprise users etc.). See More

Top Pro

Type-safe

It is easier to catch errors sooner. See More

47 32

score 226 · Answer 9

C++

Top Con

Huge language gets in the way of learning

C++ is such an atrociously over-complicated language that its learning curve may get in the way of learning fundamentals. Learning C++ well is a ten-year project, and even experts are frequently surprised by the language. See More

Top Pro

Huge language supports most everything

C++ is a large language with an even larger community and following. It has libraries for every kind of task that is possible to do with C++ See More

Top Con

Undefined behavior

Subtle errors can render the entire program "undefined" by the complicated C++ standard. The standard imposes no requirements in such cases. Thus C++ compiler writers are 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? See More

Top Pro

Powerful memory management

Allows puting large arrays on the "heap" to avoid "stack overflow". See More

Top Con

Tough to learn as the first language

Many of the concepts are hard to grasp if you have no prior programming experience. See More

Top Pro

Teaches fundamental OOP

Teaches you to leverage object oriented programming. See More

Top Con

Module system is not great

C++ uses the #include mechanism provided by C. Which unfortunately is a poor way of accessing the API of a library. Some of the reasons why the module system is weak are: Compile time scalability: The compiler must preprocess every header included in a file, and every header included in those headers. This process must be repeated for every translation unit in the program. As can be imagined, this doesn't scale very well. For each header added you are increasing the compilation time exponentially. Fragile: modules included are treated as textual imports by the compiler. This causes all sorts of problems since they are subject to any macro definitions in the time of the inclusion. If any of these macro definitions collide with a name in the library it can break the library API . See More

Top Pro

Excellent compiler optimization

Both open source compilers (such as Clang and GCC), and proprietary ones (like Intel's and Microsoft's) are very good at analyzing program flow and program optimization. This is mostly due to the widespread usage of C/C++ applications running everything from mobile/desktop/server Operating Systems, to search engines and webserver software, and the demand for performance. See More

Top Con

C++ succombs under its own weight

The years of cramped backward compatibility start to show in the syntax, complexity and very top-heavy language structures. Trying to keep up with far more elegant languages like C# doesn't do C++ any good either, because the committee always seems to be able to mess it up. After numerous years, still no modules... you must be kidding! See More

Top Pro

Teaches problem solving

The great STL is the most powerful Data Structure and Algorithms Library. It would benefit you very much in problem solving, your main main way to love programming. The code is much compact compared to Java and C#. No unnecessary classes are in your way; yet when you need classes they are available unlike C. The code runs very fast. See More

Top Con

Painfully slow compilation

Beginners need fast feedback See More

Top Pro

Teaches low-level programming, but doesn't have as many pitfalls as C

Teaches data types, low-level program flow and the so common C-style syntax while not being as much of a pain as C itself. See More

Top Con

Duplicates C features in incompatible ways

Arrays, strings, pointers, etc. have both C and C++ versions. Sometimes the C++ versions are worse. This is more useless trivia beginners have to sort through. See More

Top Pro

STD is often updated

The functionalities keep growing throughout the years. C++11 gave us a soft type of garbage collecting with the smart pointers. See More

Top Con

Undefined behaviors and weak limited type safety

Undefined behavior in a program can cause unexpected results, making it hard to debug. With UB, program behavior may vary wildly depending on optimization settings. There are many cases that invoke UB, such as signed overflow, invalid dereferences, large integer shifts, uninitialized variables, etc. 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 Pro

C code can be used in C++ code

Most C code will work as C++. See More

Top Con

No two programmers can agree on which 10% subset of C++ to use

C++ is such a huge and complicated language, that programmers have to learn a disciplined subset of it to reliably get anything done. The problem is, no-one can agree on which subset to use and they can't understand each other. See More

Top Pro

Faster execution of the same algorithms

Because C++ (and its precursor C) are "lower level" than a lot of popular programming languages they are also faster at executing code than Java or C# which require VMs and garbage collection threads. See More

Top Con

Retains nearly all bad habits of C

Top Pro

Universal, portable, best complexity/efficiency trade-off

Top Con

No reflection

C++ objects are frustratingly opaque. This makes debugging especially difficult, something beginners have to do a lot. See More

Top Pro

Best way to understand algorithms

Top Con

Memory leaks and segmentation faults

Because C and C++ allow the user direct access to memory and don't provide garbage collection threads, there is a probability that a program may have a "memory leak", which occurs when something a programmer allocated in the heap is not deallocated properly. Also, attempting to dereference memory protected by the operating system causes a segmentation fault and kills the program. See More

Top Pro

Has lots of library

C++ is mature and everything has standardized library. See More

Top Con

Arcane binding rules

Top Con

Incomprehensible operator overloading resoution

Top Con

After all these years of trying, still no decent string library.

Although you have several ways to handle strings, all of them are messy and error-prone, giving birth to many crashes and memory corruptions in the field. It's one of the worst languages ever, if you have to do strings. See More

Top Con

Bugs easily corrupt the memory you need to find them

You can usually get a core dump, but often the call stack gets completely overwritten. Compilers are not even consistent in how they map the binary objects to code. See More

Top Con

No way to locate definitions

No modules, just files, and no way to tell where anything came from. See More

Top Con

Complicated types

Top Con

Standard library missing important features

Top Con

Exceptions incompatible with C++ manual memory management

Specs

Engine:UE4 , Cocos-2d-x

Standard: ISO/IEC 14882 or C++17

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226 142

score 10 · Answer 10

ATS

Top Pro

Built-in formal specification

ATS has a theorem-proving type system powerful enough to prove that its functions meet their specifications. This happens at compile time with no performance impact at runtime. This can be used to prove that an ATS program doesn't have bugs commonly found in C++ programs, like "this function never leaks memory" or "this program never attempts to divide by zero" or "this buffer never overflows" or to verify pointer arithmetic, etc. See More

Top Con

No Windows version

But it does run on Cygwin. See More

Top Pro

Free and open-source compiler

The compiler (ATS/Postiats) is GPLv3. See More

Top Pro

Functional programming

The syntax is ML-like with the usual functional language features like pattern matching and tail-call optimization. See More

Top Pro

High-performance systems language

ATS works as a low-level systems language. ATS programs have performance and footprint comparable to programs written in C/C++. See More

Top Pro

Good module system

Similar to Modula-3. This makes ATS a viable choice even for large-scale projects. See More

Top Pro

Safe concurrency

ATS can prove its concurrent programs have no deadlocks or race conditions. See More

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10 1

score 9 · Answer 11

V

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Compile app to run on different OSes. See More

Top Pro

Sum types

V has sum types. See More

Top Pro

GUI support

V comes with (simple) GUI support out of the box. See More

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Highly understandable language. See More

Top Pro

Safety

V is very safe. See More

Top Pro

Fast like C

V is easier than C and fast like C. See More

Top Pro

Closures

V has closures, which gives the user additional options and usefulness. See More

Top Pro

Generics

V has generics. See More

Top Pro

Supports concurrency and channels

Can run functions concurrently that communicate over channels. See More

Top Pro

C Interop

Can import C libraries, structs, and headers. See More

Top Pro

Fast compile times

Compiles programs fast, less waiting around, so more productive and fun. See More

Top Pro

Lambdas

Supports using lambdas, which helps write more concise code without having to use so many lines. See More

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9 1

score 90 · Answer 12

Gambas

Top Pro

Complete IDE for GUI development

You can't find such a level of easy GUI development in any other language on the Linux platform. See More

Top Con

Not cross platform

Top Pro

Constantly updated

New features and bug fixes along with performance enhancements. See More

Top Con

The documentation is not the best

Top Pro

Easy to get started for someone familiar with VB on Windows

Top Con

May have trouble interfacing to C code structs

Managed struct objects in Gambas makes it harder to use with C code structs. See More

Top Pro

Complete application development suite

Supports GTK and QT along with web. Built in Form building with JIT speed. If you are developing an application targeting Linux only give this a look. See More

Top Con

Difficult to satisfy runtime requirements

Runtime requirements to run applications written in Gambas are not always easy to satisfy (that is, without installing the whole development environment). See More

Top Pro

Fast to write apps

Top Pro

Git integration

Integration with GIT in IDE and easy to distribute apps as source package with export as .tar.gz. See More

Top Pro

Enhanced with a new test suite

Top Pro

Runs on Windows 10 WSL2 environment, reported successful compilation on MacOS

Specs

Platforms:Linux

Current stable version:3.18.2

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90 10

score 71 · Answer 13

Free Pascal

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Top Pro

Fast compiler

Very fast, even big programs compile very quickly. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Many target platforms and architectures. See More

Top Pro

Powerful

Close to metal while being high level, performance to match C/C++ See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

71 10

score 1 · Answer 14

Catel

Top Pro

Business oriented

Complete set of modular functionality for Line of Business applications written in any .NET technology, from client to server. See More

Top Con

Missing examples

At the bottom of the GitHub page it still says: // todo: add wpf // todo: add uwp See More

Top Pro

Well documented

Top Con

Mostly a single person project

As can be seen in the GitHub Issues, most issues are handled by a single person. Most issues are solved which is quite impressive, but this situation is not ideal for the future of an open-source project. See More

Specs

Languages:C#

1 0

score 18 · Answer 15

Pony

Top Pro

Concurrency model based on actors

The unique type system allows the compiler to automatically schedule actors on threads, giving you reliable concurrency for free. See More

Top Con

All exceptions must be caught

The compiler enforces this, so code is littered with trys. See More

Top Pro

Reliable

Because of its capabilities secure type system, provided you don't use the C FFI, references will never be stale, race conditions are effectively impossible, deadlocks don't happen because locks and mutexes are never needed, and processes never crash because all exceptions must be handled. (Barring compiler bugs or external memory corruption, of course.) Pony programs can still lock up due to infinite loops, like any Turing-complete language. See More

Top Con

Limited documentation

As Pony is such a new language, documentation is relatively light, and tutorials are few and far-between. See More

Top Pro

High performance

Compiles to native code, and features an intelligent garbage collector that takes advantage of the actor architecture to get essentially free garbage collection. See More

Top Con

Few libraries

Top Pro

Trivially simple C FFI

Calling low-level C functions is as simple as use "lib:clibrary" and @c_function_name[return_type](parameter:type). Linking C to Pony libraries is just as easy, as the Pony compiler will generate appropriate header files. See More

Top Con

Garbage collector can't run until you yield

A long-running behavior can leak memory because the garbage collector has no chance to run. See More

Top Con

Limited tooling

There's no IDE. Debuggers are fairly basic. Pony is too young to have much of an ecosystem. See More

Top Con

Divide by zero is allowed

And instead of some sensible result like NaN or Inf, the answer is zero! Most languages would just raise an exception (and Pony used to do this), but since the compiler enforces the rule that "all exceptions must be caught" the proliferation of trys was determined to be too burdensome on the programmer. This makes the whole design of the exception system questionable. See More

Top Con

Unstable API

Pony is not ready for production. It has yet to release version 1.0, and there are frequent breaking changes. See More

Top Con

Difficult learning curve

The type system uses a capabilities-oriented approach to reference semantics, which can be difficult to wrap your head around at first. The lack of more common object-oriented features and the preference for simplicity over familiarity can make it difficult for new users to model their program design. See More

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18 5

score 219 · Answer 16

Pascal

Top Pro

Understanding of basics

Because of the verbosity and easy syntax, Pascal language is relatively easier to be learned and understood, even for someone who has no programming knowledge. It's said that Pascal code —if written well— is like reading pseudo code. See More

Top Con

Niche language

Most use of this language will be found in jobs supporting legacy code. It will be hard to find things to do with this language outside of that niche. See More

Top Pro

Easy

Pascal / Object pascal was used in schools during the 2000's to teach kids the basics of object oriented programming. See More

Top Con

No up-to-date version of language standards

In 1983, and update in 1990, the language was standardized with two standards: ISO/IEC 7185:1990 Pascal and ISO/IEC 10206:1990 Extended Pascal. However, Object Pascal extensions to the language have no official standards but in 1993, a draft proposal for object oriented Pascal standard was re; for review purposes only. There are no standards for modern features and enhancements, thus various Pascal dialects like Delphi or HP Pascal has their own enhancements and features. See More

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Pascal's syntax is clear and concise, for example: procedure test(); begin DoSomething(); end; See More

Top Con

Effectively obsolete

While this may have been an ok choice 25 years ago, it no longer is. Consider Python, Go or Clojure. See More

Top Pro

Enforces good programming practice

Numerous strong compile time checks with optional runtime checks ensure one doesn't do stupid things and even when one does (because the compiler can't prove it at compile time), the binary will check and report it at runtime. Correct modular programming implementation with proper namespacing, no file inclusion hack. See More

Top Con

Unnecessary heavy syntax

Begin.. end. Pascal would have been great with curly braces.. but then again, that's what C is for. It's an academic language which was used in the past, but not much anymore today. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Pascal development tools are available almost on every available platform, especially using Free Pascal. Pascal language is available on desktop like Mac, BSD, Linux, Windows, Solaris, etc.; on mobile like iOS, Android, etc.; also on managed environments like Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and .Net/Mono framework . There are even some Pascal to JavaScript transpilers such as Smart Pascal, so you can write client side web app using Pascal as well, if you really want to. See More

Top Con

All variables, types, constants and functions must be declared at the beginning of the code

Top Pro

Tons of academic reading

Being known as the programming language for education, especially in the 90's, there many academic reading and tutorials available on the internet. See More

Top Pro

Fast compilation

The compiler is fast, really fast. Compared to C/C++, the delphi compiler is designed to compile a decent sized desktop application in seconds rather than minutes. See More

Top Pro

Flexible

Using the Free Pascal Compiler (the main Pascal distribution) you can code in a language that can be procedural and imperative now, but it can became object-oriented simply adding a directive at the start of the source See More

Top Pro

Easy GUI creation

Visual Basic may have predated Delphi but Delphi was the ground breaking visual designer which set the standards expected today by most GUI developers. Its rich component set was well designed, structured and extensible, it even has the ability to display live data from the attached database in its data controls. See More

Top Pro

Assembler Code and DLL/SO creation

You can put Assembler code in Intel or AT&T formats, to achieve great results of speed and accuracy. It is possible to create Dynamic Link Libraries or their equivalent in Unix-like systems so it's relatively easy to use and powerful. See More

Top Pro

Rich existing libraries

Both shipped with implementations and spread all over the web. Both natively written or bindings to libraries written in other languages. Typically to build non-trivial applications there's no need to surf the web as many things are implemented already. Streaming, output templating, socket & networking, web, database, image manipulation, high performance graphics, (de)compression, (de|en)cryption, regex, unit testing, json manipulation, google API, indexing, multithreading, external process management, the list just goes on and on! See More

Top Pro

Still active

From the early roots of Pascal, Delphi has been developed and is still actively supported. It is used in many desktop applications today, and even supports multi platform coding. See More

Top Pro

Suitably close to modern languages, without the pitfalls

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

Top Pro

Extensive third party libraries

There are large collections of third party components, many free which enable developers to add wide ranging and complex functionality to their code with ease See More

Top Pro

Component based (reusability, decoupled, rich design architecture)

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

Top Pro

Available on a ridiculous number of platforms

FreePascal is available on/for Intel x86 (including 8086), AMD64/x86-64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, SPARC, ARM, AArch64, MIPS and the JVM. Supported operating systems include Linux, FreeBSD, Haiku, Mac OS X/iOS/iPhoneSimulator/Darwin, DOS (16 and 32 bit), Win32, Win64, WinCE, OS/2, MorphOS, Nintendo GBA, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, Android, AIX and AROS. See More

Top Pro

Language depth

Object Pascal is being used to write custom kernels (Ultibo) and operating-systems for various ARM boards. So the way you work with the code scales from low-level to pure OOP high-level. Object Pascal has the same level of depth that you find in C/C++ but with added productivity. See More

Top Pro

Incredible GUI design tools

Lazarus and Delphi are both incredible GUI design tools, making rapid development a reality. Making changes to a GUI doesn't mean switching tools or waiting for things to load, it's right there as part of your core tools. See More

Top Pro

Dynamic evolution of language

Object Pascal language still evolving and being updated by Delphi (Embarcadero) and Free Pascal team (Lazarus). See More

Top Pro

Well balanced for desktop development

For desktop development, Delphi is productive, the code is easy to understand, compilation speed is blazing, and it produces well performing applications that are easy to deploy. The perfect balance between C# and C++. See More

Top Pro

Fast execution

The compiler generates fast and optimized code. No stop-the-universe garbage collection. See More

Top Pro

Automatic memory management

The new Delphi compilers are powered by Automatic Reference Counting to ease development. See More

Top Pro

Excellent database development

Specs

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

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219 58

score 174 · Answer 17

V

Top Pro

Fast like C

V is easier than C and fast like C. See More

Top Con

Rapid changes in a language syntax/features

Since V language under a continuous development and core syntax and features will be "frozen" in a version 1.0.0, updating from older version of a language can cause a code rewrite of previously working program. See More

Top Pro

C Interop

Can import C libraries, structs, and headers. See More

Top Con

V 1.0 release was planned for December 2019

The first version of the language was publicly released in June of 2019, version 0.1.x. First beta version of the language was released June of 2022, version 0.3. x. Language has progressed faster than most. Welcomes contributors to join the project. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Compile to many OSes. See More

Top Pro

Simplicity

V is simple and powerful. See More

Top Pro

Can create multi-OS GUIs

Multi-OS GUI creation is more integrated into the language than others. See More

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Highly understandable language. See More

Top Pro

Sum types

V has Sum Types. See More

Top Pro

Generics

V has generics. See More

Top Pro

Closures

V has closures, which gives the user additional options and usefulness. See More

Top Pro

Safety

V is very safe. See More

Top Pro

Single paradigm

Follows the philosophy that there should be only one way to do something, as opposed to multi-paradigm languages like C++. See More

Top Pro

Supports concurrency and channels

Can run functions concurrently that communicate over channels. See More

Top Pro

Fast compile times

Compiles programs fast, less waiting around, so more productive and fun. See More

Top Pro

Friendly and helpful community

Just check the V Discord channel or their GitHub Discussions and you will see by yourself. See More

Top Pro

Inline assembly

Can add Assembly code. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

License:MIT

Supported platforms:Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, Solaris, Android, iOS

Developer:Alexander Medvednikov

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174 49

score 107 · Answer 18

Pharo

Top Con

Small community

But they are very friendly and supportive. Best help comes through the mailing lists so not always easily googlable. There is also a Slack community where help is nearly instantaneous. See More

Top Pro

Object-Oriented

In Pharo everything is an object. Compiler - object, network - object, method - also an object. And objects communicate with messages. No operators, no control-flow statements. Just objects and messages. Few things to learn, but you can learn OOP well. See More

Top Con

Odd language

Requires a different mindset. Much harder to apply what you know from popular or conventional languages . Switching over from or between other languages is more difficult. See More

Top Pro

Easily learnt

There is good, free documentation including several books written by experts with extensive examples. There is an online MOOC. There are many tutorial videos. Supportive conferences and community. Even a professional support option if desired. See More

Top Con

Single threaded

Pharo's VM only ever uses one CPU core. If you want to write code that uses more than one CPU core, you need to jump through hoops such as running multiple VMs and synchronising your data. See More

Top Pro

Live updates

The nature of Pharo being a "live" environment allows you to perform live updates to your system without requiring to restart it. You can upgrade/modify classes while serving requests at the same time. See More

Top Pro

Highly productive

Top Pro

Seaside

The framework for developing sophisticated web applications in Smalltalk is developed in Pharo. Seaside lets you build highly interactive web applications quickly, reusably and maintainably. See More

Top Pro

Remote debugging

Top Pro

Beautiful coding patterns in your IDE

No need to search google for compact beautiful examples of how to do things, your live environment source is available and you can easily live search, see how it works and copy how the masters would do it (examples most languages still copy too). See More

Top Pro

Glamorous toolkit & GTInspector

Most languages are still copying the Smalltalk tools of yesterday - GTInspector (written in Glamorous) takes live exploration of code/running objects to a new level. It's really slick, and better yet, you can easily write your own inspectors in 10 lines of code. See More

Top Pro

Code can be run on rock solid GemStone environment

Top Pro

64 bit support as of Pharo 7

Use 32 bit or 64 bit versions of Pharo on Windows, Mac & Linux. See More

Top Pro

Advanced code analysis tools

MOOSE environment provides extensive, easily leveraged and class leading tools for code analysis and improvement. See More

Top Pro

Can run headless for production

Top Pro

Really simple networking and REST with Zinc

Top Pro

Graphics, graphing and visualisation framework - Roassal

Roassal and Mondrian provide fantastic and easily used frameworks for graphics, graphing and advanced visualisations (comparable to D3.js) but with much less code. Visualisations can be rendered into web friendly graphics (SVG, .png etc.) without additional work. See More

Specs

Platforms:MacOSX; Linux; Windows

License:MIT

Auto Complete:Y

Typing discipline:Dynamically typed

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107 33

score 41 · Answer 19

Qt / C++

Top Pro

Good documentation

Professional, thorough documentation with examples, available either in a web browser or in the stand-alone desktop client called assistant. See More

Top Con

Not free/expensive

Free version is limited and prohibitive. See More

Top Pro

Portable

Linux, BSD, Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Blackberry ... Qt has 'em all. See More

Top Pro

Global community

The community behind Qt is both massive and approachable. Digia (also owners) are joined by the likes of Intel, KDAB, ICS, Canonical and numerous others in sponsoring development, while communities such as KDE also contribute significantly. Forums are active, mailing lists are open, irc channels chatting, git repositories well managed. Answers to questions are usually minutes away. See More

Top Pro

QML

QML is "HTML5 done right": a declarative language that integrates beautifully with C++ code when necessary and exposes the power of the GPU ... simply the best way to create a modern GUI in terms of effort and results. See More

Top Pro

LGPL license

Top Pro

Open Source

Qt is licensed under a OSS license through a dual-license policy. See More

Specs

License:LGPL (for open source)

Price:Free (for open source)

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41 15

score 165 · Answer 20

Common Lisp

Top Pro

Carefully designed for interactive use

Almost all aspects of the language are designed with interactive/repl use in mind. See More

Top Pro

Very Powerful REPL with SLIME

SLIME (Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs). See More

Top Pro

Condition/restart system

It is easy to recover from errors. Error resolution can be determined by the user at the REPL. See More

Top Pro

Image based runtime

The state of the program may be saved and reloaded as an image, supporting safer modification of the running program. New code may be compiled into the image as the program runs, while late binding ensures that symbol redefinitions take effect throughout the program. See More

Top Pro

Almost as fast as, or faster than, C

Some compilers such as SBCL can be faster than C or other low-level languages, and most compilers can generate fast native code. See More

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