What is the best alternative to Ruby (via Opal)?

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score 5 · Answer 1

Mint

Top Pro

Writen in Crystal (Language)

Crystal is one of the best and elegant languages. See More

Top Pro

Constructs for synchronous and asynchronous computations

Top Pro

Easy to learn and write

Everything is an expression. See More

Top Pro

HTML and CSS integration

HTML can be written with minimal differences. Scoped .CSS can be written for elements in components. See More

Top Pro

Good error support

200+ unique error messages to help you on the way. See More

Top Pro

Everything is typed

Everything is typed using a simple type system See More

Top Pro

Dead code elimination

Only used parts of the code compiles into the final bundle. See More

Top Pro

Built-in formatter

Mint has a built-in formatter to format your code, it can run standalone or with the development server. See More

Top Pro

Batteries included

Mint contains everything you need to build the frontend of web applications from styling to data storage through HTTP requests to testing. See More

Top Pro

Integrated testing

Testing is part of the language and there is a test runner built in which runs tests in the browser. See More

Specs

Platforms:Mac Linux Web

Price:Open Source

Current stable version:0.5.0

Site:https://www.mint-lang.com

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5 0

score 82 · Answer 2

Reason ML

Top Pro

Uses the excellent Bucklescript Ocaml to Javascript transpiler

Top Con

A standard async syntax is pending

Async syntax is not standard across native/js projects and in both cases a bit awkward for non-ocaml devs. Currently this is reasonml most voted issue in their GitHub repo so hopefully, there's news soon. See More

Top Pro

Superior type inference

Ocaml type inference is so smart that you never have to repeat yourself and keep code very clean, type errors also are very pleasant. See More

Top Con

Ecosystem is a mess

A wonderful language, but a user is required to use multiple different package managers for many things (esy, bsb, npm). Some standard templates from bsb (e.g. react-starter) are not installable out of the box. See More

Top Pro

Aims to make the transition from Javascript easier

Despite being a completely different language Javascript programmer will find that the syntax of ReasonML has many familiarities with Javascript. See More

Top Pro

Uses established compiler technology from Ocaml with a tweaked syntax that leans more towards Javascript

Top Pro

Removes JavaScript "bad parts" but sticks to it's design philosophy

unlike other js-targetting languages that are thought as a way to have a language that pleases community X run in a browser, reason is really designed with JavaScript community in mind. it removes the bad parts but keeps its syntax and its best design principles (from Scheme): simplicity, minimalism, and functions as building block. See More

Top Pro

Immutability with escape hatches

reason includes true immutability, but it has escape hatches to let you use mutations in exceptional cases. See More

Top Pro

Compiles to JavaScript or assembly (ocaml)

The same reasonml code can compile to js (eg. run on browsers or node.js, use any lib in npm), or compile to assembly thru ocaml (unless of course you load js externals), running on any device, with C-comparable (or better) performance. See More

Top Pro

JSX syntax natively supported

Reason was created by the creator of react, for developers already using JSX to template web or native UIs this results very familiar. See More

Specs

Version:3.6.0

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82 7

score 2 · Answer 3

Earl Grey

Top Pro

Powerful hygienic macros

Earl Grey's macro system allows for creating powerful control structures that look just like builtin ones. EG also supports macro libraries which allows developers to provide their macros/DSLs for others to use. See More

Top Con

Not true static typing

EG gives you the tools to implement your own type-checking inside of argument lists and elsewhere but there's no analysis done at compile-time like other compile-to-js languages. See More

Top Pro

Pattern matching

Pattern matching is an incredibly powerful tool that, once you've tried, you cannot live without. This is not your average hacked-together pattern matching but a complete and integral feature to the language. See More

Top Con

Unfamiliar syntax

While the language shares a lot of DNA with Python, there are still many new (and interesting) features/sugar that may take some time to get used to. See More

Top Pro

ECMAScript 6 Asynchrony

Earl Grey provides Promises based on ECMAScript version 6 and as many NPM libraries already implement. Earl Grey also provides a promisify function that converts old-fashioned callback-style asynchrony to promises. See More

Top Pro

Fully compatible with Node.js ecosystem

Anything available on NPM can be used just as easily with Earl Grey. In fact, everything else can be used too! Earl Grey has interfaces to Browserify, Webpack, and even experimental support for SystemJS. Earl Grey can even be used to generate npm packages that any node-compatible language can use! See More

2 0

score 23 · Answer 4

Haste

Top Pro

Client and Server as the same application

Haste was designed to allow both the client and server to be written as parts of the same, type-safe application. This is in stark contrast to most other options, where the client and server are considered two separate entities, resulting in extra manual validation code and more chances for type errors. See More

Top Con

Lacks some minor Haskell functionality

Lacks support for Template Haskell. See More

Top Pro

Almost full power of Haskell

Haste supports the Haskell 2010 standard except for Template Haskell as well as most GHC extensions. See More

Top Pro

Automatic, type safe program slicing

Haste lets you write client and server as a single program, automatically generating code for the server as well as the client, giving you full type safety even across the Internet. See More

Top Pro

Generates small, reasonably performant code

23 5

score 20 · Answer 5

Amber

Top Pro

Includes an IDE

Amber includes an integrated development environment with a class browser, workspace, transcript, object inspector and debugger. See More

Top Con

Very few learning resources

There are very little learning resources for Amber outside the official documentation. Which may not be enough for beginners, especially people that don't have much experience in programming. See More

Top Pro

Smalltalk is a simple, elegant, and powerful language

Top Pro

One-to-one JS equivalent

Amber is written in itself, including the parser and compiler, and compiles into efficient JavaScript, mapping one-to-one with the JS equivalent. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows Linux FreeBSD

20 5

score 1 · Answer 6

Python (via Skulpt)

Top Pro

Suspensions

You can write blocking methods that don't cause the whole page to hang, something difficult to do in languages targeting Javascript. See More

Top Con

Python 2.6

Skulpt implements an outdated version of the Python language. See More

Top Pro

Interactive REPL

You can evaluate new Python code in the browser written by the user. See More

1 0

score 109 · Answer 7

PureScript

Top Pro

Higher kinded types

Has Typeclasses and RankNTypes See More

Top Con

Lots of dependencies needed to get started

Purescript is written in Haskell, but meant to be used with Node.js. As a result, to get started , users must install ghc, cabal, node.js, grunt, and bower. Purescript also has its own compiler, and different semantics form Haskell, and so even after installing, there's still some overhead to getting productive with Purescript. See More

Top Pro

High performance FFI code

The Eff monad, which is used for FFI code, optimizes out calls to bind, and supports tail call optimization, resulting in clean, efficient Javascript. The psc compiler also specifically recognizes the ST monad, and transforms scoped variables into mutable Javascript variables, for even more efficient code. See More

Top Con

Lack of good IDE/tooling support

Top Pro

Type safety

Compiling should be your first unit test. A tight type system (static and hopefully strong) will catch many logic errors that are often difficult to spot through debugging. In languages like PureScript, if it compiles, it often runs properly. See More

Top Con

Documentation not updated

Top Pro

Pure functional language

You cannot have side effects, unless a function is explicitly defined as so. See More

Top Con

Ecosystem not stable

Top Pro

Modules can be compiled to CommonJS

Modules compiled to CommonJS can be included with 'require', making it incredibly simple to call Purescript code from Javascript. See More

Top Con

Restrictive FFI

Functions exported are all curried, and must be called as such from Javascript. The FFI syntax for importing Javascript functions, while slightly simpler and more readable than UHC/Fay's, means that calls to methods on objects must be wrapped to pass the object explicitly as a parameter. See More

Top Pro

Has row polymorphism and extensible effects

Top Con

Slow compilation

On large project, for example Halogen See More

Top Pro

FFI

FFI system is quite good and easy to use. You can import functions curried or not curried. Records and arrays use native JS objects and arrays. See More

Top Pro

Thorough documentation

The Purescript website has fairly thorough documentation for all of the language's features, and the Purescript blog contains several examples of practical usage. See More

Top Pro

Awesome web frameworks

Thermite (React) Halogen (VDOM, similar to ELM) And hit these up with Signals, Isolated/(Managed?) Components, powerful functions and FFI See More

Specs

Current stable version:0.15.4

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109 26

score 79 · Answer 8

Scala.js

Top Pro

Type inference

Scala offers type inference, which, while giving the same safety as Java's type system, allows programmers to focus on the code itself, rather than on updating type annotations. See More

Top Con

Can be intimidating for beginners

Scala is an industrial language. It brings functional programming to the JVM. All books/tutorials cover friendly aspects of Scala, but there are corners of the language that one can wander into that are not friendly to beginners. See More

Top Pro

Implements a mature language

In contrast to other options, Scala.js is a compiler plugin for an already existing and mature language: Scala. As such, it benefits automatically from the existing compiler, from the language design choices made for Scala, which exists and is established in the industry since years. See More

Top Con

A complex language with a lot of incidental complexity that results in significant mental overhead

Top Pro

Easy, type-safe, interop with JavaScript

The JavaScript-interop of Scala.js is very direct and lightweight. See More

Top Con

Combines OOP and functional programming for a hodge-podge paradigm

Its excellent mix of functional and OOP programming just like Python to use the tool best suited See More

Top Pro

The strength of Scala on the server

The strength of Scala (JVM) on the server can not be underestimated, and is probably superior to any other choice listed here (where applicable; many have no server-side equivalent). Being able to use such a powerful language (and ecosystem) on the server AND on the client, and sharing code between the two, is a big advantage. See More

Top Pro

Extensive standard libraries

Scala.js implements most of the Scala standard library and many parts of the Java one. Among others, it supports Scala's rich collection library. See More

Top Pro

Dead-code elimination

Scala.js performs dead-code elimination out of the box (when running in the "fullOpts" mode). See More

Top Pro

Multiparadigm

Scala supports both Functional and Object Oriented styles of programming. Beginners can learn both paradigms without having to learn a new language, and experts can switch between the two according to what best suits their needs at the time. See More

Top Pro

Crossbuilding

Keeps your client and server sources in sync. See More

Top Pro

Incremental compilation

Through SBT, Scala.js supports incremental compilation out of the box. That is: SBT automatically picks-up the changes (think "watch" in other tools) and only recompiles what is needed. This makes the development cycle fast and very pleasant to work with. See More

Top Pro

Excellent tooling (IDE) support

The same good and mature tooling that can be used for Scala can be used for Scala.js out of the box (code-completion, refactoring, immediate feedback, etc.). See More

Top Pro

Immutable values

The immutable values make it perfect for working with concurrency. See More

Top Pro

Macros

Because Scala.js is a plugin to the Scala compiler, the whole power of the Scala language is available at compile-time. Which includes macros. Very expressive things can be done, in a type-safe way, which are difficult or impossible in other languages. See More

Top Pro

Simple build system compared to Javascript

While SBT is arguably not as simple as Maven, it beats the chaos of the JavaScript build ecosystem. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.13.1

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79 20

score 148 · Answer 9

ClojureScript

Top Pro

Live interactive programming with figwheel

Figwheel builds your ClojureScript code and hot loads it into the browser as you are coding! Every time you save your ClojureScript source file, the changes are sent to the browser so that you can see the effects of modifying your code in real time. See More

Top Con

Tooling is horrible

I've never seen worse tooling before. Writing tests and getting test coverage reports is near impossible. Tooling is brittle and clunky. Feels prehistoric. See More

Top Pro

Simple syntax

Lispness makes ClojureScript trivial to comprehend after an initial learning overhead. See More

Top Con

Syntax may seem cryptic to people not used to Lisp

Lisp is sometimes called "syntax-less" and this is bewildering to those steeped in Algol-type syntax (Java, Javascript, C, etc). Being a dialect of Lisp, ClojureScript's syntax may seem cryptic and hard to understand for people not used to it. While Lisp has very little syntax compared to other languages and it's generally considered pretty terse, there's still an initial overhead in learning the language. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use existing JavaScript libraries

Clojure and ClojureScript are designed to be able to interact with their host. So the language by design makes it is easy to use existing JS libraries. See More

Top Pro

Targets Google Closure-ready JavaScript for immense optimizations

Google's Closure Library converts regular JavaScript into a highly optimized form - including dead code analysis/elimination. It can even remove pieces of unused code from 3rd party libraries (eg, if you import jQuery but only use one function, Google Closure includes only that piece). See More

Top Pro

Share application logic between browser and Clojure server

Clojure is also able to run web servers, so one can reap similar benefits to NodeJS in terms of sharing code between client and server. See More

Top Pro

Can be used with React out of the box

Top Pro

Excellent build tools

Both Leiningen and Boot are great build tools that manage code dependencies and deployment. See More

Top Pro

Excellent tools for web development

ClojureScript has superb wrappers around React.js (see Reagent) that make building single-page apps a breeze. With figwheel, it's a web dev experience unlike any other -- hotloaded code, repl interaction, and instantly reflected changes make good development fun and fast. You can add things like Garden to make CSS-writing part of the same holistic experience and suddenly all development is a pleasant, smooth process. See More

Top Pro

The Spec core library

From the creator of Clojure: Spec is a new core library (Clojure 1.9 and Clojurescript) to support data and function specifications in Clojure. Writing a spec should enable automatic: Validation, Error reporting, Destructuring, Instrumentation, Test-data generation and Generative test generation. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.9

GZipped size:32 kB

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148 40

score 252 · Answer 10

Haxe

Top Pro

Compiles to multiple platforms and languages

Haxe allows you to develop for Web, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, OSX, Linux and others, all at once, without the need to switch languages and maintain separate code bases. This is possible because Haxe can compile to JavaScript, ActionScript, Flash AVM bytecode, C++, Neko, PHP, C# (.NET) and Java. Support for even more platforms and languages is under development. See More

Top Con

Bad support in some popular IDEs

While it has great support in Visual Studio Code and Vim for example, it still lacks support in some IDEs such as IntelliJ. See More

Top Pro

Powerfully expressive but easy to learn

The language was designed to be very expressive with the smallest possible amount of syntactic sugar. There are actually fewer keywords than other languages with similar power. See More

Top Con

You need to code interfaces to work with existing JavaScript code

Some popular libs like JQuery have maintained externs, for any specific code or lib already in JS you have to write the externs to use it in your haxe application. See More

Top Pro

Extremely fast compilation

Haxe can easily compile over 100,000 lines of code to JS in seconds on a mid-spec computer. See More

Top Con

No Qt support

There is currently no support for Qt. See More

Top Pro

Similar to JavaScript and ActionScript 3

The language is very easy to learn for those with background in JavaScript or ActionScript 3. See More

Top Con

Full programs only

You can create small utility functions with Haxe, but generally it is a lot more work than with other JS compilers. Haxe is best used when you have a larger project. See More

Top Pro

Large library support. From servers to games.

Haxelib (common library repo) and other sources contain large codebases for anything from cryptography to communications. A lot of these are fully cross platform and work with the JavaScript target. The JavaScript target can be used for everything from node.js server applications (with code completion) to games using either the Flash-like OpenFL library or direct canvas or WebGL programming. See More

Top Con

It's not easy to convince people it's as good as it really is unless you can get them to really try it

Top Pro

Established project

Haxe has been around for more than 10 years (since 2005) and whilst not the most popular project, has had continuous growth. Highly unlikely to disappear or for support to stop. See More

Top Pro

Friendly community

Friendly community See More

Top Pro

Pick up errors at compile time

One big advantage over pure javascript, (or some other languages listed here) is that Haxe will pick up a whole range of errors when you compile, saving you the pain of having to try and debug them later. This includes everything from syntax errors ("Unexpected ;") to type errors ("Class user has no field username. Suggestion: username"). See More

Top Pro

First class code completion

Code completion is built into the compiler and available to the IDE allowing for much smarter code completion that can actually parse and understand the syntax tree. See More

Top Pro

Small, readable output

The output that is generated can be trimmed using "dead code elimination" to only include those functions and libraries that are strictly necessary. All code is very readable with only minimal extras for specific functionality. Small output is good for frontend development as file size is a major concern. See More

Top Pro

Powerful type inference with strong typing

After a type is inferred from its context, it cannot be changed to a new type, and type safety is done at compile time so it stays safe without the extra maintenance required for static typing. See More

Top Pro

Syntactic macros

Syntactic macros allow you to extend compiler features at the syntax tree step. Macros come into play after code is parsed into the abstract syntax tree, and macros allow you to transform it before the rest of the compilation completes. This provides for immense power, while at the same time scoping the extensibility at a level that is powerful, but well constrained. See More

Top Pro

Code reuse server side and client side

You can use the same classes on the server as you do on the client where applicable. This saves a lot of time. See More

Top Pro

Ability to use existing JS libraries

Haxe has the ability to use "externs". These are haxe files which describe the usage of existing JS libraries. Get code completion and compile-time-checking for everything from jQuery to Node.js. Even without externs, native JS code can still be used through untyped code. See More

Top Pro

Can create complex applications without needing webpack, npm or other crutches

Haxe has the power and expression to not need the npm dependancy hell that is common in js and typescript, bit it's still simple. See More

Top Pro

Algebraic data types and pattern matching.

Top Pro

Offload execution to the server with remoting

Using a remoting proxy you can get type safe server to client communications, allowing for remote method execution on the server as if they were part of the client side code. See More

Top Pro

Package management like Java

Package tree is just directory tree, it's wonderful! See More

Top Pro

Builtin conditional compilation support

Haxe supports conditional compilation, so depending on compiler flags Haxe will include or exlcude sections of your code. Making it easy to have debug and release builds. See More

Top Pro

Abstract enums allow constants with exhaustiveness check

You can define constants in an abstract enum and when used in a switch/case statement Haxe checks for exhaustiveness, making sure every constant is covered - with no runtime implication. See More

Top Pro

Type safety for exísting JS libraries

Haxe compiler will check types when using externs for existing libraries. See More

Top Pro

Available in NPM

Top Pro

Ability to skip type checking when calling non Haxe code

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

Top Pro

Create without needing to be limited to a language, target, or commercial ecosystem

Top Pro

Abstracts allows me to create more intative api's without runtime overhead

Specs

Platforms:Web, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, OSX, Linux

Supported languages:C++, C#, Java, Javascript, PHP, Lua, Python, Actionscript

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252 70

score 9 · Answer 11

ElixirScript

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Uncluttered, yet unambiguous syntax See More

Top Pro

Great for concurrency

Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM See More

Top Pro

Excellent community

The Elixir community has proved to be welcoming and very supportive. See More

Top Pro

More familiar syntax

All of the benefits of Erlang; without as steep a learning curve of prolog based syntax. Elixir is heavily inspired by Ruby's syntax which many people love. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

Elixir's documentation is very good. It covers everything and always helps solving any problem you may have. It's also always available from the terminal. See More

9 4

score 160 · Answer 12

Mint

Top Con

Not international

Only works for US & Canada banks, and even then there are banks (like EQ Bank) that have actively blocked access to Mint. See More

Top Pro

All accounts in one place

Mint can handle banking accounts, saving accounts, credit cards, etc. It consolidates all your accounts together so you do not need to put work into following multiple accounts. See More

Top Con

Online only

It does not work offline. See More

Top Pro

Organizes budget into categories

Mint splits your spending into different categories, such as gas or fast food, so you can see where you're spending too much money or how much you need to budget for. See More

Top Con

Unsafe

With very few exceptions, Mint isn't just syncing your data over, but is using your username and password to log directly into the bank website. Banks will not reimburse for any fraud or stolen funds that may result from this, or may use Mint as an excuse to not reimburse for charges or stolen funds that occur from other causes. See More

Top Pro

Alerts

Mint can be set to alert you to various events such as upcoming bills, or low balances on any accounts. It can be set to alert you from the app, through email or by text message. In addition you can sign up to recieve monthly emails about your money and ways to improve your budget. See More

Top Con

Categories organization not flexible

Top Con

The budgeting part has too many bugs

Top Con

Very complicated tool

Of course, it's powerful but also very complicated. Some would prefer tools which are less robust, has less features but are a lot easier. See More

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160 52

score 52 · Answer 13

Idris

Top Pro

Full dependent types

Idris not only has support for type classes, but is a fully dependently typed language, giving you the full power to statically verify your code. See More

Top Con

Not widely used

Top Pro

Domain driven design and type driven development

Because of full dependent types in Idris, the programmer can focus more on modelling the domain with types and waste less time fixing common bugs that the type checker will catch. Dependent types help apply type driven development and a lot of code auto generation, making the compiler and type checker an ally in developing working software instead of just getting in the way. See More

Top Con

Not widely used

Top Con

Weaker type inference

As type inference is undecidable for dependently-typed languages, Idris cannot offer the full type inference that Haskell supports, and so more type annotations will be needed. See More

Top Con

Different semantics from Haskell

Idris, while similar to Haskell, has strict semantics, which may cause some confusion if your backend is done in Haskell. If using Idris, it would make sense to do the backend in Idris as well, if not for the fact that Idris currently has fewer libraries available for web development than Haskell. See More

52 22

score 275 · Answer 14

Dart

Top Pro

Great async language support

Dart is a single threaded programming language. So if any piece of code blocks the execution of the program, the program practically freezes. To avoid this Dart makes use of asynchronous operations which let your program run without getting blocked. This is done through Future objects. A Future is an object which represent a means for getting a value at a certain point in the future. A function may invoke a Future and when that happens, two outcomes can be achieved: The function is unable to return a value, so it queues up work to be done and returns an uncompleted Future object. Or later when a value is available to be returned, the Future object completes with that value. See More

Top Con

Doesn’t generate consumable JavaScript at present

Dart builds to JavaScript but the entire app needs to be built to JavaScript at once for now (that may change in the future). See More

Top Pro

Great standard library

Dart includes a truly comprehensive core library, making it unnecessary to include disparate, external resources for basic functionalities Other than reducing the need to pull in various 3rd-party utilities this also ensures that all Dart code looks and feels the same. Out of the box, the developer gets core libraries to help with: async, collections, strings, regexps, conversions, formats, file I/O, math, typed data, and more. See More

Top Con

Still many holes to fill while converting code to Javascript

While implementing callbacks, passing a type to any function that gets passed to Javascript causes the dart2js compiler to crash. See More

Top Pro

No compile time in development

Dartium (Chromium derivative) is a browser with integrated Dart VM, which allows you to run and debug native Dart code during development for short edit-reload cycles. Only for testing on other browsers and deployment is transpiling to JS necessary. See More

Top Con

Dart SDK does not provide standard (out of the box) way to access SQL-based databases on server side

This missing (but very popular) feature requires to use 3rd-party packages developed by the personal enthusiasts or very small groups of enthusiasts, which is not very convenient because they are all very fragmented in terms of content, the essence and capabilities. See More

Top Pro

A lot of tools are available to help in developing with Dart

Dart has a lot of tools available which help with developing Dart applications. Some examples of those tools include: pub - package and dependency management and build tool analyzer - static syntax analysis with linter, quick fixes, autocompletion support for easy IDE integration test - powerful and flexible testing framework and test runner dev_compiler - generate reusable JS instead of tree-shaken minified JS output (work in progress) dartfmt_ - source code formatter server-side VM observatory - a powerful tool for profiling and debugging running Dart code (for Dartium and Dart server code) See More

Top Con

Small community, little momentum

Top Pro

Transpiled JavaScript code works on all browsers

In Dart many browser differences (subtle differences and also missing features) are abstracted away or polyfilled. When Dart is transpiled to JS the output works on all supported browsers. There is usually no need to load polyfills or to consider browser differences during development. No need for libraries like jQuery to make the same code work the same on all browsers. See More

Top Con

May be difficult to use some JavaScript libraries

Dart is much more than a programming language, it's a platform with its own standard libraries and tools. It's a major departure from JavaScript itself (even though it can compile to JS) that it's not possible to directly interact with JavaScript libraries in Dart. Instead, you have to use a special interop library which exposes the wrapped versions of the JavaScript objects that you are accessing. While this enables Dart to sandbox JavaScript so that its problems do not leak into a Dart application, it also means that it may be cumbersome to use libraries which don't have a wrapper library available. See More

Top Pro

Will be familiar to Java developers

The language will look familiar to Java developers, easing the learning curve. And yet, while it's similar, it has some nice syntax facilities to avoid common boilerplate code found in Java. Code is terser, yet readable. See More

Top Pro

Easy prototyping

Dart has an optional type system which makes Dart a great language for prototyping. It encourages developers to gradually evolve their programs without worrying about types first. See More

Top Pro

Can compile to efficient machine code

Dart was designed to be as expressive as possible. Ahead-of-time compilers can compile Dart code to efficient machine code. This is especially important when deploying to mobile where you don't want (or can't) use a JIT. See More

Top Pro

AngularDart 2.0 support

Top Pro

Optional strong mode.

Strong mode applies a more restrictive type system to Dart to address its unsound, surprising behavior in certain cases. See More

Top Pro

Support of semi-coroutines (generators)

Generators, also known as semicoroutines, are also a generalization of subroutines. Generators are primarily used to simplify the control of iteration behavior of a loop, the yield statement in a generator passes a value back to a parent routine. A generator is very similar to a function that returns an array, in that a generator has a certain number of values. But instead of building and returning an array that contains all the wanted values, a generator returns them one at a time, this saves memory and allows the caller function to start processing the first few values immediately. See More

Top Pro

The Dart to JavaScript compiler generates high quality source code

Dart to Javascript compiler (dart2js) generates very high quality source code with very high optimization. The output code is also very readable and easy to understand. See More

Top Pro

Crossplatform

Dart does not just compile to JavaScript, it also compiles to native code on mobile platforms like iOS and Android as demonstrated by flutter.io See More

Specs

Current stable version:2.1.0

IDE Support:Good quality IDE plugins for Jetbrains IDEs and Visual Studio Code

Standard:ECMA

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275 98

score 333 · Answer 15

Kotlin

Top Pro

Great tooling support

Since Kotlin is made by Jetbrains (the developers of IntelliJ IDEA) so it stands to reason that the IntelliJ support for Kotlin is also great. Besides that, Kotlin also works well with existing Java tools such as Eclipse, Maven, Gradle, Android Studio, etc... See More

Top Con

May be hard for programmers already used to imperative style to learn functional programming from Kotlin

Since Kotlin does not enforce any particular paradigms and is not purely functional, it can be pretty easy to fall back to imperative programming habits if a programmer comes from an imperative background. See More

Top Pro

Easy adoption for existing Java programmers

Kotlin runs on the JVM and Java interoperability has been one of the main objectives since the language was born. It runs everywhere Java does; web servers, mobile devices (Android), and desktop applications. It also works with all the major tools in the Java ecosystem like Eclipse, IntelliJ, Maven, Ant, Gradle, Spring Boot, etc. All of this makes adoption extremely easy even for existing Java projects. On top of this there's also ensured Type safety and less boilerplate code needed. See More

Top Con

The need for Java interoperability has forced some limitations

The need to make Kotlin interoperable with Java has caused some unintuitive limitations to the language design. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn if you have prior programming experience

Kotlin's syntax is extremely easy to understand. The language can be picked up in a few hours just by reading the language reference. See More

Top Pro

No runtime overhead

The standard library is relatively small and tight. It mostly consists of focused extensions of the Java standard library and as such adds no additional runtime overhead to existing Java projects. See More

Top Pro

Officially supported for Android development

Starting with version 3.0 of Android Studio, Kotlin support will be built-in. This means that it's now easier than ever to use Kotlin for existing Android projects or even start writing Android apps only with Kotlin from scratch. This also means that Kotlin and Kotlin plugins for Android Studio will be fully supported in the future and their likelihood of being abandoned is quite small since Google is fully embracing the language for their Android ecosystem (alongside Java and C++). See More

Top Pro

Low-risk adoption for existing Java codebases

Since it has such a good interoperability with Java, Java libraries, and Java tools. It can be adopted for an existing Java codebase at little to no cost. The codebase can be converted from Java to Kotlin little by little without ever disrupting the functionality of the application itself. See More

Top Pro

Does not impose a particular philosophy of programming

It's not overly OOP like Java and it does not enforce strict functional paradigms either. See More

Top Pro

Is built to solve industrial problems

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

Current stable version:1.3

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333 119

score 479 · Answer 16

Elm

Top Pro

No run-time exceptions

Lack of run-time exceptions makes it easy to produce large swathes of reliable front-end code without drowning in tests. See More

Top Con

Lack of typeclasses

Elm doesn't have typeclasses which means some code needs to be duplicated. A fix in a function that needs typeclasses means all of the duplicates need to be fixed too. See More

Top Pro

Inferred static typing

ML static typing is great because it's always there, you just choose how explicit you want to be and how much you want the compiler to do. See More

Top Con

limited js interop

only one way ports are available as a crude js FFI. This means you can only call functions both directions but will not get a result. See More

Top Pro

Super easy refactoring with very helpful compiler errors

In no other language you can refactor so easy without any worries, since the compiler will guide you through. It is like TDD but than compiler-error driven. See More

Top Con

Harder to get buy-in from devs and mgmt

It's a total divergence from what most people are used to in the JS ecosystem. The change in syntax can be scary, the change in approaching problems can be scary. The fact that it's not backed by FANG can be scary. The fact that it's not v1.0 can be scary. The governance model and the deliberately slow release cadence can be scary. There are a couple harsh medium articles, hackernews/reddit posts out there made by people with an ax to grind that can be scary if you don't have a better picture of the Elm community, the tradeoffs that have been made, or the benefits to be had over other options. None of these are good reasons to write off further investigation of a great tech, but it happens. See More

Top Pro

Designed around high-level front-end development

As Elm was designed as a front-end langauge, it has out of the box support for things like DOM-element creation, letting programmers focus on their application logic, rather than implementation details specific to the web. See More

Top Con

Code Repetition

Because of the lack of genericness Elm needs a lot of code to be repeated. There are 130+ implementations of map in elms core libraries. See More

Top Pro

Great and simple way to learn Purely Functional Programming

You can try to apply some functional programming ideas in other languages that have an imperative basis, but you haven't seen the real power unless you tried it in the environment of purely functional programming. Elm is a simple language with great learning resources and easy graphical output, which makes it easy to explore the power of functional programming. Plus programming in Elm is very readable. See More

Top Con

Features get removed without warning

Often features that are deemed to be misused by the community like infix operators get removed without much of a warning. See More

Top Pro

Good tooling

All major editors have great support. With Atom for example, Elm plugins are available for linting, formatting, make/compiler support and Elmjutsu will simply overflow you with super useful functions, like navigate to referenced definition and show expression type. See More

Top Con

Community harsh if criticised

If one even dares to start a discussion about a feature on elms slack, discord, subreddit or github one will be aggressively shut down often argueing that one should use purescript instead See More

Top Pro

Batteries included

The Elm Architecture means you don't need to spend valuable time and effort choosing the right frameworks, state management libraries, or build tooling. It's all built in. See More

Top Con

Poor Windows support

Few if any of Elm's core contributors are Windows users and breaking bugs are sometimes left for weeks or months. See More

Top Pro

Static module system

Elm uses easy to use modules. Use: import List import List as L import List exposing (..) import List exposing ( map, foldl ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe(..) ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe(Just) ) Creation: module MyModule exposing (foo, bar) See More

Top Con

Good for beginners not good for experts

Development in elm is quite nice until you need some more advanced features. These however are actively discontinued and removed because elm wants to establish a "single way of doing things" philosophy See More

Top Pro

Missing syntactic sugar

Easy to learn, most functions have only one way, not 5 alternatives where you must study where to best use what. See More

Top Con

Updates break existing code often

The last few updates of elm broke existing code in major ways. See More

Top Pro

Growing community

Top Con

Adds an additional layer of abstraction

Some users claim that Elm adds an additional layer of abstraction, meaning that it is one more hurdle between the brain and the product. See More

Top Pro

Interactive Programming and Hot Swapping

Support for hot swapping and interactive programming is included. See More

Top Con

Functional programming itself has quite a steep learning curve

Functional programming can be quite difficult to get your head around. It takes time to unlearn object orientational habits. See More

Top Pro

Easy to code review

The lack of side-effects and simple, consistent language semantics make it easy to quickly review incoming changes. See More

Top Con

No Genericness in the future

Currently there is no code genericness like typeclasses possible, it has been officially stated that this will never change. See More

Top Pro

Higher confidence in code correctness and quality

Pure functions, immutable data structures, amazing compiler, clean and homologous syntax used for HTML, logic, and optionally to replace CSS, elimination of entire classes of bugs so you don't even need most unit tests. These factors lead to better code, better programs, higher confidence, and ultimately, more satisfaction. See More

Top Con

Not database-friendly

It is lots of work to make a server or database your "one source of truth", as Elm makes you write endless JSON parse boilerplate to talk to the server. See More

Top Pro

Not quite Haskell semantics

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

Top Con

No Syntactic Sugar

Often you need to write longer and less readable code because there are no alternatives that are more concise. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows Linux Mac Web

Current stable version:0.19.1

GZipped size:23.2 kB

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479 170

score 2 · Answer 17

Opa

Top Pro

Type Inferred

Opa uses type inference to decide what code runs on the client or the server, so you can organize code how you like, but still be sure that it runs where it needs to. See More

Top Con

Not popular

Opa is not as popular as other languages which compile to JavaScript. Making it harder to find learning resources or even answers if you get stuck somewhere. See More

Top Pro

Familiar Javascript Syntax

Opa's syntax is very similar to JavaScript, making it an easy choice for developers who are used to developing in JavaScript. See More

Top Pro

Client and Server in the same language

2 1

score 2 · Answer 18

Parenscript

Top Pro

It is Common Lisp

Lisps are easy languages to learn (once you get past the parens) and Common Lisp is a very practical dialect. See More

Top Con

The syntax may be hard to learn

Being an implementation of Lisp, Parenscript's syntax may seem cryptic and hard to understand for people not used to it. While Lisp has very little syntax compared to other languages and it's generally considered pretty terse, there's still an initial overhead in learning the language. See More

Top Pro

Run almost identically on both the browser and server

Parenscript code can run almost identically on both the browser (as JavaScript) and server (as Common Lisp). See More

2 1

score 408 · Answer 19

C#

Top Pro

.NET is a great toolbox

C# runs on top of the .NET framework, which provides many libraries containing classes used for common tasks such as connecting to the Internet, displaying a window or editing files. Unlike many other languages, you don't have to pick between a handful of libraries for every small task you want to do. See More

Top Con

Older versions lacks standard-library support for immutable data structures

Top Pro

Incredibly Well-Engineered Language

Where other languages invoke the feeling of being a product of organic growth over time, C# just feels like an incredibly well-designed language where everything has its purpose and almost nothing is non-essential. See More

Top Con

Complex syntax

Too many syntactic constructs to learn before it becomes usable. See More

Top Pro

Awesome IDE for Windows

On Windows, Visual Studio is the recommended C# IDE. It provides a very flexible GUI that you can rearrange the way you want and many useful features such as refactorings (rename a variable, extract some code into a method, ...) and code formatting (you can pick exactly how you want the code to be formatted). Visual Studio also highlights your errors when you compile, making your debug sessions more efficient since you don't have to run the code to see the mistakes. There's also a powerful debugger that allows you to execute the code step-by-step and even change what part of the code will be executed next. In addition to giving you all the line-by-line information you'll need in a hassle-free manner, Visual Studio has stuff you can click on in the errors window that will take you to the documentation for that error, saving you several minutes of web searching. In addition to all of this, Visual Studio has an intuitive, intelligent, and helpful graphical user interface designer that generates code for you (the best of WYSIWYG, in my opinion), which is helpful for new programmers. Being able to create a fantastic-looking UI with one's mouse and then optionally tweak with code helps make programming fun for beginner developers. Visual Studio also has the best code completion --Intellisense is every bit as intelligent as the name says it is. It, as well as VS's parameter hinting, is context-, type-, user-, and position-sensitive, and displays relevant completions in a perfectly convenient yet understandable order. This feature allows a new programmer to answer the questions "What does this do?" and "How do I use it?" right then and there rather than having to switch to a browser to read through extensive documentation. This allows the programmer to satisfy their curiosity before it is snuffed out by several minutes of struggling through exhaustive documentation. And for the more adventurous and text-ready developer, Microsoft does the best job of ensuring that everything, from interfaces and wildcard types down to Console.WriteLine("") and the + operator, is well-documented and easy to understand, with relevant and well-explained usage examples that manage to be bite-size yet complete, simple yet truly helpful. The reference site is easy to navigate, well-organized, clean and uncluttered, up-to-date, and fresh and enjoyable to look at, and every page is well-written with consideration for readers who are not C# experts yet want to read about changing the console background color. The best part? It's free! Visual C# Express contains all of the features described above, at zero cost. If you are a student, you can probably get Visual Studio Professional from your university, which also includes tools for unit testing and supports plugins. See More

Top Con

.NET is a mess

Continual drama with standards, updates, Microsoft, and being really cross-platform. See More

Top Pro

Supports some functional features

C# is primarily object-oriented, but it also supports some features typically found in functional languages such as lambdas, delegates and anonymous classes. Methods can be treated like any other object, and the Linq query system operates on monads with lazy evaluation (though it hides this with a lot of syntactic sugar). You don't need to use these features to code in C#, though, so you can start with OOP and then learn about them. See More

Top Con

Excessively class based OOP oriented

Limits users into overly using awkward paradigm and creating another kind of spaghetti code. See More

Top Pro

Great introduction to object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming is the most widely-used paradigm. C# offers support for common OOP features such as classes, methods and fields, plus some features not found in competing languages like properties, events and static classes. C# code is much more readable thanks to the syntactic sugar it offers. You can truly concentrate on your code, not on the way it's implemented. See More

Top Con

A pale imitation of Java

C# is a Java-like language, but Microsoft failed to imitate Java's consistency. For instance, C# has types that cannot be passed by address (e.g. DateTime), forcing the developer to use ugly workarounds. See More

Top Pro

Best language for Windows programs

C# is clearly the best choice for Windows programs. The .NET framework contains everything you need to build great-looking apps, without having to learn the confusing Win32 API or download a ton of external libraries. C# can also be used to build Windows 8's "modern" apps. See More

Top Con

Too easy to write multithreading apps that are buggy

Many web frameworks or GUI libraries will push novice users to writing multithreaded code, which leads to frustrating race condition bugs. Other languages with multithreading push users towards safe constructs, like passing messages and immutable or synchronized containers. But in C# the data structures aren't synchronized by default, and it's too easy to just set a field and observe the result from another thread (until you compile with Release, and now you have a heisenbug). See More

Top Pro

Very high demand in the industry

C#'s been around for just the right amount of time, is regularly updated with useful additions, is versatile, easy to write & read, & has excellent tooling support. This means it is a top choice for many organizations & will remain so for the foreseeable future. See More

Top Con

Often-used products in most C# development environments get expensive

The majority of the C# development community uses Microsoft products which are not all free and open-source. As you get into the enterprise level of some of these products and subscriptions, the expense is multiple factors of 10 greater. While you can use a fully open-source and free C# environment, the community around that is much smaller. While this can be said for other languages as well, the majority of C# falls into the for-pay Microsoft realm. See More

Top Pro

Can mix high and low level programming

You can code at the high level without worrying about pointers and memory management, but if you so choose you can switch to lower level programming with direct memory management and pointer manipulation (though you need to compile to specifically allow this). See More

Top Con

Popularly used on Visual Studio (proprietary)

Most people learn and depend on Visual Studio (proprietary) to write C#. The result is people learn how to use an IDE and not the concepts or fundamentals of good programming. However, you don't need VS to develop in C#, all you need is the dotnet CLI and a text editor that supports OmniSharp like VSCodium, Vim and Emacs. See More

Top Pro

Awesome IDE for cross-platform development

Visual studio has embraced cross platform development over the past 3 years. With Visual Studio Code, you now have a light, and quick IDE variant available for free as well. See More

Top Con

Large Library and eco system makes it unsuitable for beginers

yes, all the information about the .net framework is in one place, but it is so extense that it introduces a steep learning curve for newcomers to the field of programming languages. See More

Top Pro

With ASP CORE a good language to learn

With CORE you are no longer just limited to Windows, so a language worth learning. See More

Top Pro

Supported on many platforms

C# can be used for Windows apps, Linux apps, OS X apps, Windows 8 "modern" apps, websites, games, iPhone apps, Android apps, Windows Phone apps, and more. If you want to create a cross-platform application, you can share most of the code and write one GUI for each platform. See More

Top Pro

.NET truly universal

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

Top Pro

Great language for Unity game engine

Unity provides a selection of programming languages depending on preference or knowledge - C#, JS, Boo and UnityScript. C# is arguably the most powerful with better syntax and stronger language structure. It allows using script files without attaching them to any game object (classes, methods inside unattached scripts that can be used at any time). There are more tutorials and information for C# than UnityScript and Visual Studio can be used to code for unity in C#. Additionally, learning C# allows using it outside of Unity as well unlike UnityScript. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, IOS

License:MIT, Open Source

IDE Support:Visual Studio on Windows, JetBrains Rider, Visual Studio Code on other platforms

Standard:ECMA

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408 162

score 490 · Answer 20

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

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

Has built-in async support

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