What are the best functional programming languages for game development?

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DevelopmentGame Development

What are the best functional programming languages for game development?

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Oct 15, 2023

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15 Options Considered

Best functional programming languages for game development	Price	Current stable version	GZipped size
-- Elixir	-	1.11.2	3.61 MB (without required Erlang VM)
-- F#	-	6.0	-
-- Elm	-	0.19.1	23.2 kB
-- Erlang	-	-	-
-- Haskell	-	-	-

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score 6 · Answer 1

Elixir

Top Pro

Great for concurrency

Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM See More

J Falkgaard's Experience

Fringe. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.11.2

GZipped size:3.61 MB (without required Erlang VM)

Site:https://elixir-lang.org

Top Pro

Full access to Erlang functions

You can call Erlang functions directly without any overhead: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/erlang-libraries.html See More

Top Pro

Powerful metaprogramming

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

Top Pro

Easy to download libraries

Comes with built in build tool called "mix". This will automatically download libraries and put them in the scope of the application when you add them to the "deps" function and run mix deps.get 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

Top Pro

Syntax is similar to Ruby, making it familiar for people used to OOP

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 getting started tutorials

The tutorials are very clear and concise (even for a person not used to functional programming). Plus they are also very mobile friendly. See More

See All

score 13 · Answer 2

F#

Top Pro

Concise syntax

F#'s syntax tends to be terse while remaining very readable and easy to understand without being a chore to write. See More

Top Con

Has no ad-hoc polymorphism (á la Type Classes)

You have generics, you have interfaces, you have inheritance, you have a lot of things at your disposal but you don't have Type Clases. They can be emulated using some clever constructs but there's nothing like having the real thing. See More

Specs

Current stable version:6.0

License:Apache 2.0

IDE Support:Visual Studio, Code, Rider

Top Pro

Natively supported by Visual Studio

This is a .Net language natively supported by Visual Studio. Though it is not as tooled up as C# the support is still substantial. In particular, C# deployment scenarios can be enabled for it with small C# wrapper projects. Integration with Visual Studio provides: IntelliSense, debugging, projects an other features. See More

Top Con

Not really cross platform

Though the community sites are touting F# can be cross platform through use of Mono, the reality is that it is more of a hack to replay on larger mono applications in production. See More

Top Pro

.NET Interoperability

Since F# runs on the Common Language Runtime or CLR, it has access to the entire .NET Framework, as well as libraries written in other .NET languages such as C#, VB.NET, and C++/CLI. See More

Top Con

.NET's garbage collection is slow

Top Pro

Easier transition from other paradigms

Since F# is not a purely functional language, it lends itself to being more easily picked up by programmers that have experience with other paradigms. See More

Top Pro

Allows writing predictable code

Like many other functional languages, F# takes a stance of immutability for everything (state, values etc...). There are several reasons why having immutable values is good. One of those is that the code you are writing becomes much more predictable and you don't have to worry about any side effects. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Top Pro

Powerful syntax

Top Pro

Built-in REPL

Makes it easy to write scripts and explore the language. See More

Top Pro

Type Providers

Top Pro

F# is supported by Xamarin

Thanks to Xamarin, F# is a functional language that you can use to build for iOS, Android and Windows. See More

Top Pro

Fall into the pit of success

F# directs you into a workflow where the right way is the path of least resistance. Coming from a C# background, its restrictions might feel arbitrary at first (e.g., what do you mean my code has to be in dependency order!? Arbitrary alphabetical or bust!), but you'll soon realize that your code is cohesive, concise and consistent in a way that it never was before - and you can compile and run with confidence! See More

Top Pro

You can run F# in the browser

Thanks to a project like Fable, you can write and run your client app in F# and run it over JavaScript. It allows you to share code between your server and client. See More

Top Pro

Multiplatform, it runs on .Net Core

Forget Xamarin and Mono. F# now runs on the multiplatform .Net Core! See More

See All

score 11 · Answer 3

Elm

Top Pro

Good documentation

Top Con

State management requires a lot of boilerplate

J Falkgaard's Experience

Fringe. See More

Specs

Current stable version:0.19.1

Platforms:Windows Linux Mac Web

GZipped size:23.2 kB

Top Pro

The language is small

When a language is small the learning curve that precedes actually starting shortens. See More

Top Con

Does not have typeclasses

Top Pro

No runtime exception as users can easily find errors on compiler messages.

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 Pro

High-level Functional-Reactive Code

Build animations, games, and interactions with an incredibly small amount of terse, readable code. 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 Pro

Growing community

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 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 Pro

Immutable -> deterministic -> hot-swappable code -> time-travelling debugger

Using Elm's immutable data + pure-function determinism and elm-reactor, a built-in live debugging web server, you can record your inputs live, reverse execution, make changes to your code, and play forward your inputs to see how your changes affect output. This is beyond amazingly useful for running up to a problem in your game, rewinding the execution to a known good state, fixing your code, then running it forward, and rapidly repeating until things work the way you want. Never again have to waste time stopping, re-compiling, and playing the game up to where your code executes every single time you patch or re-factor. Elm and the time-travelling debugger is your new best friend! See More

Top Pro

Community packages

The Elm community shares in actively developing and maintaining community packages that use the Elm Architecture to tackle specific problems and provide libraries of advanced functionality. On top of the individual developer contributions available in the Elm package repository, community packages provide a sort of standard library of extensions that compliment one another and build upon the core Elm packages. See More

Top Pro

Compiles to HTML + CSS + JavaScript

Compile direct to the Web Platform. Use HTML5 technologies, including canvas, WebGL, Websockets, WebAudio, and more. Works with external JS scripts and libraries. So, go ahead and use Elm with JS game engines and frameworks like Phaser, Pixi.js, and many, many others. Feel empowered to use Elm in your hybrid apps through mobile wrappers like Cordova/PhoneGap and CocoonJS, and with accelerated modern WebViews like Canvas+, WkWebView, Crosswalk, etc. See More

Top Pro

Pub/Sub simplified effects model

Elm implements an observer and emitter model for publishing and subscribing to events and other data streams, allowing Elm programs to interact with and respond to the external runtime environment. This extends to input and other browser events, external JS command execution, async network requests, RequestAnimationFrame(), timers, and more. See More

Top Pro

Lightning fast Virtual DOM

Like Mercury and Om, the Elm language uses virtual DOM to speed up manipulations, transformations, and property and attribute accesses, enabling extremely high levels of responsiveness. This feature, coupled with the Elm Architecture, is the inspiration for the popular Redux project of ReactJS fame. See More

Top Pro

Excellent language support in Visual Studio Code (cross-platform, free, open source rapid development editor with tooling)

The Elm language extension is par excellence, with syntax highlighting, auto-completion, code snippets, live function lookup and documentation (IntelliSense support), built-in Elm REPL (interactive command line), built-in elm-reactor (the time-travelling debugger) as the debug browser, and line-granular compile error highlighting, with more features like refactoring support and even more code snippets being developed. See More

Top Pro

The language was designed for modeling graphics

The language was designed with the idea of replacing the DOM with a simpler abstraction for managing graphics. See More

See All

score 4 · Answer 4

Erlang

Top Pro

Light processes

Erlang's processes have very little overhead (about 500 bytes per process). This means that a huge amount of processes can be created, even on older machines. See More

Top Pro

Fault-tolerant

Fault tolerance means that a system has the property to continue operating even though one or more components have failed. For Erlang systems, this means that the system is kept running even if for example a user has to drop a phone call rather than forcing everyone else to do so. In order to achieve this, Erlang's VM gives you: Knowledge of when a process died and why that happened The ability to force processes to die together if they depend on each other and if one of them has a fault. A logger that logs every uncaught exception Nodes that can be monitored so that you find out when they go down The ability to restart failed processes (or groups of them) See More

Top Pro

Battle proven

Erlang has been used in production for more than 20 years now. During that time it has proven itself over and over again that works great in both small startups and large-scale enterprise systems. Erlang has been used extensively by Ericsson themselves. For example, the AXD301 ATM, which is one of Ericsson's flagships is probably the largest Erlang project ever with more than 1.1 million lines of Erlang code. See More

Top Pro

Great for writing distributed applications

Erlang is made to be parallel and distributed. Because it's very easy to write code that uses multiple processor cores, it's also very easy to write applications that span multiple servers. See More

Top Pro

Built from the ground up with concurrency and distributed computing in mind

Erlang has strong roots with the telecom industry in which concurrent processes are normal. It's designed to be concurrent, to be used for distributed computing and to be scalable. See More

Top Pro

Upgrade code without stopping the system

In a real-time system it may not be possible to stop the system in order to implement code upgrades. For these cases Erlang gives you dynamic code upgrade support for free when using OTP. The mechanism is very easy to understand and works as follows: Start the app Edit the code Recompile That's all that is needed, the app updates with the new code while it's still running and tests are run automatically. See More

Top Pro

Consistency across platforms

Erlang's processes run in a complete independent way from the OS (they aren't managed by the OS scheduler neither). This means that programs written in Erlang will run exactly the same way regardless of the operating system or platform. See More

See All

score 10 · Answer 5

Haskell

Top Pro

Pure functional language

With Haskell, you need to use a pure functional paradigma with monoids and all of it. This is both a pro and a con, but generally permits an "evolution" of the programming ability of the user. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

Learning Haskell is not trivial. Haskell lends itself well to powerful abstractions - the result is that even basic, commonly used libraries, while easy to use, are implemened using a vocabularly that requires a lot of backround in abstract mathematics to understand. Even a concept as simple as "combine A and B" is often, both in code and in tutorials, described in terms of confusing and discouraging terms like "monad", "magma", "monoid", "groupoid", and "ring". This also occasionally bears its ugly head in the form of complicated error messages from type inference. See More

Specs

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

Paradigm:functional

Type System:static

Top Pro

Ability to use C (via foreign function interface)

When Haskell isn't enough, you can always drop down to C. See More

Top Con

Documentation for most packages is short and lacking

A few Haskell packages are well documented but this is the exception, not the rule. Most of the time a list of function signatures is what passes for documentation. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight syntax and type inference

Haskell's white-space sensitive syntax, particularly together with the apply operator ($), saves your strained curly-brace, comma, and parentheses keys from overwork. Compared to languages like Scala or Lisp, Haskell code is much easier on the eyes, and saves you all that time you'd otherwise spend making sure your parentheses match up. See More

Top Con

Too academic, hard to find "real world" code examples

Top Pro

Good ecosystem: examples and libraries

Plenty of games have been built in Haskell, such as Frag, a 3D First Person Shooter, and plenty of libraries and engines exist. Functional Reactive Programming is also gaining steam both inside and outside the Haskell community, and many Haskell FRP frameworks exist. See More

Top Con

You need some time to start seeing results

Haskell's static typing, while helpful when building a project, can be positively frustrating for beginners. Quick feedback for errors means delaying the dopamine hit of code actually running. While in some languages, a beginner's first experience may be their code printing "Hello World" and then crashing, in Haskell, similar code would more likely be met with an incomprehensible type error. See More

Top Pro

Open source

All Haskell implementations are completely free and open source. See More

Top Con

Lazily evaluated

Haskell's lazy evaluation implies a level of indirection - you're not passing a value, you're passing a thunk. This is often difficult to grasp not just for beginners, but for experienced programmers coming from strictly evaluated languages. This also means that, since for many, strict evaluation is their first instinct, initial expectations of a function's performance and complexity are often broken. See More

Top Pro

Fast (compiled, statically typed)

Haskell's type system lets programmers provide the compiler with the information it needs to make optimizations for performance comparable to C. GHC in particular has had plenty of work done to improve performance, and the LLVM backend means that generated code can also benefit from optimizations from the LLVM project. See More

Top Con

You have to learn more than just FP

Haskell is not only a functional language but also a lazy, and statically typed one. Not only that but it's almost necessary to learn about monads before you can do anything useful. See More

Top Pro

Popular in teaching

Haskell is really popular in universities and academia as a tool to teach programming. A lot of books for people who don't know programming are written around Haskell. This means that there are a lot of resources for beginners in programming with which to learn Haskell and functional programming concepts. See More

Top Con

Package manager is unstable & lacking features

Cabal (There are other choices but this is the most popular) can not uninstall a package. Also working at a few locations it is difficult to have the same environment for each one be the same. See More

Top Pro

Forces you to learn pure functional programming

It is pure and does not mix other programming paradigms into the language. This forces you to learn functional programming in its most pure form. You avoid falling back on old habits and learn an entirely new way to program. See More

Top Con

Language Extensions lead to unfamiliar code

Haskell's language extensions, while making the language incredibly flexible for experienced users, makes a lot of code incredibly unfamiliar for beginners. Some pragmas, like NoMonomorphismRestriction, have effects that seem completely transparent in code, leading beginners to wonder why it's there. Others, like ViewPatterns, and particularly TemplateHaskell, create completely new syntax rules that render code incomprehensible to beginners expecting vanilla function application. See More

Top Pro

Very few language constructs

The base language relies primarily on function application, with a very small amount of special-case syntax. Once you know the rules for function application, you know most of the language. See More

Top Pro

Highly transferable concepts

Haskell's referential transparency, consistency, mathematics-oriented culture, and heavy amount of abstraction encourage problem solving at a very high level. The fact that this is all built upon little other than function application means that not only is the thought process, but even concrete solutions are very transferable to any other language. In fact, in Haskell, it's quite common for a solution to simply be written as an interpreter that can then generate code in some other language. Many other languages employ language-specific features, or work around a lack of features with heavy-handed design patterns that discourage abstraction, meaning that a lot of what is learned, and a lot of code that is needed to solve a particular problem just isn't very applicable to any other language's ecosystem. See More

Top Pro

Referentially transparent

Haskell's Purely Functional approach means that code is referentially transparent. This means that to read a function, one only needs to know its arguments. Code works the same way that expressions work in Algebra class. There's no need to read the whole source code to determine if there's some subtle reference to some mutable state, and no worries about someone writing a "getter" that also mutates the object it's called on. Functions are all directly testable in the REPL, and there's no need to remember to call methods in a certain order to properly initialize an object. No breakage of encapsulation, and no leaky abstractions. See More

Top Pro

Mathematical consistency

As Haskell lends itself exceedingly well to abstraction, and borrows heavily from the culture of pure mathematics, it means that a lot more code conforms to very high-level abstractions. You can expect code from vastly different libraries to follow the same rules, and to be incredibly self-consistent. It's not uncommon to find that a parser library works the same way as a string library, which works the same way as a window manager library. This often means that getting familiar and productive with new libraries is often much easier than in other languages. See More

Top Pro

Quick feedback

It's often said that, in Haskell, if it compiles, it works. This short feedback loop can speed up learning process, by making it clear exactly when and where mistakes are made. See More

Top Pro

Functions curry automatically

Every function that expects more than one arguments is basically a function that returns a partially applied function. This is well-suited to function composition, elegance, and concision. See More

Top Pro

Hand-writeable concise syntax

Conciseness of Haskell lets us to write the expression on the whiteboard or paper and discuss with others easily. This is a strong benefit to learn FP over other languages. See More

Top Pro

Easy to read

Haskell is a very terse language, particularly due to its type inference. This means there's nothing to distract from the intent of the code, making it very readable. This is in sharp contrast to languages like Java, where skimming code requires learning which details can be ignored. Haskell's terseness also lends itself to very clear inline examples in textbooks, and makes it a pleasure to read through code even on a cellphone screen. See More

Top Pro

Easy syntax for people with a STEM degree

Since the basic syntax is very similar to mathematics, Haskell syntax should be easy for people who have taken higher math courses since they would be used to the symbols used in maths. See More

Top Pro

Powerful categorical abstractions

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

See All

score 4 · Answer 6

Go

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

Specs

Current stable version:1.21.0

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac etc.

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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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

See All

score 4 · Answer 7

Nim

Top Con

Memory management disasters

Will be stuck with bad performance while choosing from all kinds of memory management options that aren't good. See More

Top Pro

Compile-time execution

Nim has 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

FunnyTalos's Experience

Easy to read, lighting fast, cross compatible, static typed. See More

Specs

Current stable version:2.0.0

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

License:MIT

GZipped size:14,2 MB

See All Specs

Top Con

Atrocious error messages

Unhelpful to users, wasting hours deciphering and extremely annoying. See More

Top Pro

Multi paradigm

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

J Falkgaard's Experience

Fringe. See More

Top Con

Concurrency hard to use

Difficult to use, too verbose. See More

Top Pro

Has built-in async support

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

Top Pro

Strict typing

Checks your code at compile time. 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

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

Really crossplatform

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

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

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

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

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

Really cross-platform

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

See All

score 4 · Answer 8

Clojure

Top Pro

Has nice editor/ide Nightcode

Specs

Current stable version:1.10.1

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

GZipped size:3.7Mb, requires JAVA

Site:www.clojure.org

Top Pro

Has dialect ClojureScript for web-developing

Top Pro

Uses the JVM ecosystem

Top Pro

Has dialect ClojureScript for web-developing

See All

score 3 · Answer 9

Common Lisp

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

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

Top Pro

Very Powerful REPL with SLIME

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

Top Pro

Carefully designed for interactive use

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

See All

score 2 · Answer 10

Rust

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

Asynchronous I/O is not (yet) a part of the core language

The issue of asynchronous I/O is still being discussed as a language feature, and not yet in the implementation phase. See the RFC on GitHub here. See More

HumorousTamKung's Experience

Hard to learn but great to use. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.71.1

Platforms:Linux, MacOS X, Windows, BSD

License:MIT/Apache

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

Hard to find learning resources or libraries

Because it's still a relatively new language, Rust does not enjoy a following as large as other languages/environments. Rust development has also been rather volatile for a long time during the beginning of the development of the language adding to this issue. Because of the small community, it's harder to find useful libraries for projects or any other kind of resource. See More

J Falkgaard's Experience

Memory safety is a major concern for embedded systems and critical real-time systems, not games. There are many magnitudes more important other factors for game dev. 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

Very new and untested

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

See All

score 3 · Answer 11

OCaml

Top Pro

Strong editor integration

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

Top Con

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

Lacks native support for Windows systems. See More

Specs

Current stable version:4.0.7

License:LGPL version 2.1

Site:http://ocaml.org

Price:Open source (Free)

See All Specs

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

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

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

See All

Answer 12

JavaScript

Top Pro

Integrates very well with UE4

Coding an immersive 3D game can retain the attention of new programmers. ncsoft/Unreal.js. See More

Specs

Engine:V8/ChakraCore

Author:Ryan Dahl/Joyent

ECMAScript Modules:Available (as a flag) (only on Node 8.x-10.x)

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

See All Specs

Top Pro

Prototype based Object Oriented System

Being object oriented, it supports the predominate and powerful programming approach. Being prototype based, it provides an intuitive approach to OOP. Whereas other popular languages use classes, which focus on thinking in the abstract, Javascript's prototypes allow you to focus on thinking in the concrete. For example, in a prototypical language, you think of a rectangle, and define it. You now have a rectangle. Let's say you want a red rectangle, you copy the rectangle and give it the property red. Want a blue one? Copy rectangle again give it a blue. Big blue rectangle? Copy blue rectangle and make it big. In a class-based language, first you describe a rectangle, describe a red rectangle as a type of rectangle, describe blue and big blue rectangles, and now that you have described them, you must create instances of them, and only then do you have the rectangles. Essentially: Classes are factories for objects, prototypes are objects themselves, and the latter method was created to be more intuitive, which is particularly advantageous to beginners. See More

Top Pro

Modern ESNext is far better than the JS of days past

Modern JS has made great strides, and can be targerted to older (or non-standard) browsers using Babel. There are new language constructs that can make programming in JS comfortable.; e.g.: async / await ( <3 ). See More

Top Pro

Atwood's Law "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript."

May also be a con. See More

Top Pro

Several Platforms to use the web stack and JS to create multi-platform apps

Opens the door to native application development as well as just websites. Use with React Native, Weex or Quasar (Vue), PhoneGap or Cordova, NativeScript... (etc) to build native apps. Use mostly the same code base for multi-platform and web. See More

Top Pro

Great tools for development

Flow, JSHint/ESLint, Babel, npm, etc. See More

Top Pro

Can be very simple (teachable)

By setting a few ground-rules (effectively coding in a subset of JS), JS is one of the simplest languages to learn (requiring very few must-learn prerequisite concepts). See More

Top Pro

High demand for JavaScript developers

If you're looking for a career as a developer, JavaScript is the place to focus your attention. There is a huge demand for good developers especially in frameworks such as React and Angular. See More

Top Pro

Complete dev stack can be run online

With codepen.io and other prototyping tools, you can learn Javascript from a mobile device. You don't even need a computer. It can be learned from an internet cafe or public library. See More

Top Pro

Instant gratification

While it's easy to argue that Python will give you instant gratification, JavaScript is far better in this regard. Make a small change to a page and it's immediately visible in the browser. You can throw in a JavaScript library like jQuery with minimal fuss. See More

Top Pro

JSON is native to JS

JSON is arguably a "must-learn". With JS, that's one less additional syntax to learn. See More

Top Pro

Very good debugger

Has a built in debugger with break points, watches that work on local values, and a console that you can use to edit anything at any time. Both in the browser (eg: Chrome), and server (eg: Nodejs). See More

Top Pro

C-like syntax

After learning Javascript, you will feel at home in other languages as C-like syntax is very common. See More

Top Pro

Massive ecosystem

JavaScript has one of the largest programming ecosystems, as shown by the being the most popular language for projects on GitHub. As there are so many projects written in JavaScript there are lots of libraries available to build off of and many of them are written to be easy to use and integrate into other projects. There are also lots of resources available for learning JavaScript. Other than traditional tutorials, language learning sites such as Codecademy have JavaScript courses. The Mozilla Developer Database also serves as a great resource for learning about the standard libraries built into JavaScript. See More

Top Pro

Easy to build an application

By using the UI capabilities in HTML and CSS you can develop substantial applications with graphical interfaces more quickly and with less effort than in other languages which would require you to learn a windowing library. Building a useful application is one of the best ways to learn a new language and because of the low learning curve for creating applications you can create more substatial programs and learn more practical programming priciple faster. See More

Top Pro

First-class functions with lexical closures

While certainly not the only language with these features, this pro alone is so powerful that it compensates for most of JavaScript's problems. You'll learn to use closures and higher-order functions well in JavaScript, because you have to. And then you can generalize this knowledge to any other language that has these, and the good ones do. See More

Top Pro

Runs on both the browser and the server

With Node.js, it is now possible to run JavaScript as a web server. This would allow you to be able to create server based applications sooner than would if you had to learn a separate programming language as well for server side code. As JavaScript is the only language supported by web browsers it puts it in the unique situation of being the only programming language that's available on both the client side and server side. See More

Top Pro

No installation required

If you run a web browser you already have JavaScript installed and can get started right away. Modern browsers such as Chrome also have very powerful programming consoles built into them. Aside from the browser console, you can also use online Javascript playgrounds such as JS Bin and JS Fiddle. Even from a tablet. See More

Top Pro

Required for web development

If you are looking to create web projects, you will have to learn Javascript in order to develop the client side code. If you learn the foundations of programming in JavaScript you can reapply that education later in building web applications. See More

Top Pro

Speed (most implementations)

JS/ES is in the running for the fastest interpreted language given the optimizations and JIT integration of popular implementations. On the other hand, it fails utterly when compared with compiled (to native or VM code) languages. See More

See All

Answer 13

C

All

1

Specs

Current stable version:C'18

Paradigm:imperative

Language type:imperative, ALGOL family

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

See All Specs

Answer 14

C#

Top Pro

3rd Party support

Lot's of tools and libraries available. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Web, Android, iOS

Language type:Interpreted

Current Stable Version:10

Top Pro

Versatile

.NET offers rich functionality. See More

Top Pro

Forms

Can be designed visually with the Visual Studio designer for traditional Windows forms, WPF, or Web forms. See More

Top Pro

Visual Studio

The Visual Studio IDE offers one of the best development environments. The Community Edition can be used for free. See More

See All

score 2 · Answer 15

Programming in Lua

Top Pro

Tons of frameworks based on lua language

Corona SDK LÖVE Cocos2d-x Gideros See More

Top Con

Not really a functional programming language

Top Pro

Very close to Javascript

See All

15 Options Considered

My Recommendation for Elixir

My Recommendation for Elixir

Great for concurrency

Full access to Erlang functions

Powerful metaprogramming

Easy to download libraries

Great documentation

Syntax is similar to Ruby, making it familiar for people used to OOP

Great getting started tutorials

My Recommendation for F#

My Recommendation for F#

Concise syntax

Has no ad-hoc polymorphism (á la Type Classes)

Natively supported by Visual Studio

Not really cross platform

.NET Interoperability

.NET's garbage collection is slow

Easier transition from other paradigms

Allows writing predictable code

Cross-platform

Powerful syntax

Built-in REPL

Type Providers

F# is supported by Xamarin

Fall into the pit of success

You can run F# in the browser

Multiplatform, it runs on .Net Core

My Recommendation for Elm

My Recommendation for Elm

Good documentation

State management requires a lot of boilerplate

The language is small

Does not have typeclasses

No runtime exception as users can easily find errors on compiler messages.

Batteries included

High-level Functional-Reactive Code

Super easy refactoring with very helpful compiler errors

Growing community

Inferred static typing

No run-time exceptions

Immutable -> deterministic -> hot-swappable code -> time-travelling debugger

Community packages

Compiles to HTML + CSS + JavaScript

Pub/Sub simplified effects model

Lightning fast Virtual DOM

Excellent language support in Visual Studio Code (cross-platform, free, open source rapid development editor with tooling)

The language was designed for modeling graphics

My Recommendation for Erlang

My Recommendation for Erlang

Light processes

Fault-tolerant

Battle proven

Great for writing distributed applications

Built from the ground up with concurrency and distributed computing in mind

Upgrade code without stopping the system

Consistency across platforms

My Recommendation for Haskell

My Recommendation for Haskell

Pure functional language

Steep learning curve

Ability to use C (via foreign function interface)

Documentation for most packages is short and lacking

Lightweight syntax and type inference

Too academic, hard to find "real world" code examples

Good ecosystem: examples and libraries

You need some time to start seeing results

Open source

Lazily evaluated

Fast (compiled, statically typed)

You have to learn more than just FP

Popular in teaching

Package manager is unstable & lacking features

Forces you to learn pure functional programming

Language Extensions lead to unfamiliar code

Very few language constructs

Highly transferable concepts

Referentially transparent

Mathematical consistency

Quick feedback