What are the best systems programming languages?

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May 12, 2019

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25 Options Considered

Best systems programming languages	Price	Current stable version	Site
89 Nim	-	0.19.4	https://nim-lang.org
82 Rust	-	1.34.1	rust-lang.org
77 C	-	C'18	-
65 C++	-	-	-
-- D	-	2.076.0	https://dlang.org/

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score 63 · Answer 1

Nim

Top Pro

Very good performance

Nim consistently benchmarks ahead of Go, Java, C#, Haskell, and of course all the scripting languages. See More

Top Con

Still in pre 1.0

Not very stable and has a rather small community. See More

MeticulousFecunditas's Experience

Compiles to efficient C code so you can run it anywhere, but still a nice and extendable syntax. The ability to do meta-programming can also shift a lot of computation to compile-time without having to create stand-alone scripts and put magic numbers in your code. See More

Specs

Current stable version:0.19.4

Site:https://nim-lang.org

Rust

Top Pro

Built-in concurrency

Rust has built-in support for concurrency. See More

Top Con

Immature Tooling & Ecosystem

Compared to C/C++, there isn't yet the wide range of tools available (IDE's, static analysis, build systems), while unavoidable for any new language and improving over time - its a noticeable down-side. See More

kungfu's Experience

Looking at rust code will give you a headache, it is such a hard language to read. And this "memory safety" is also very hard, it is not free you have to work for it for so little gain, which means your development time will increase 5x easily. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.34.1

Price:Free

Site:rust-lang.org

License:MIT/Apache

Top Pro

Dependency management

Rust has an easy to use, advanced, platform agnostic dependency management system. One can even define Git repositories as dependencies so one can avoid the use of Git submodules. Also it is very easy and convenient to distribute reusable packages. See More

Top Con

Nearly no standard API

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

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score 31 · Answer 3

C

Whether you are writing application code or trying to code-golf something down to the fewest bytes and milliseconds (perhaps both at the same time) possible, as opposed to languages such as C++, notoriously painful to read and debug, C's simplicity at its heart will make the job much less annoying. See More

Top Pro

More control over the code

Top Pro

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

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

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score 37 · Answer 4

C++

Top Pro

Highly portable

Implementations exist for hundreds of operating environments, from mainframes and super computers all the way down to tiny embedded devices. See More

Top Con

Atrocious complexity

The grammar is undecidable. Subtle errors can make the meaning of the program "undefined" by the spec. See More

penilloppee's Experience

Very portable. Together with C. These are the only programming languages that are officially supported in Android, iOS, and Windows. Also C++ is fast evolving, there are so many very good abstractions now in C++11/C++14/C++17 and next... C++20... Which will have compile time reflections and meta-classes! See More

Specs

Price:Depends on Implementation

Standard: ISO/IEC 14882 or C++17

Engine:UE4 , Cocos-2d-x

Top Pro

Powerful generic (meta) programming capabilities with templates

When you leverage the power of the c++ templating system enough, you can make the compiler execute a Turing complete program. You can even e.g. calculate prime numbers during compile time. This is far more powerful than simple generics in e.g. Java and C#. On top of type safe containers one can use it to e.g. Static polymorphism (polymorphism without performance cost) More type safety without performance cost Functional programming / lazy evaluation See More

Top Con

Bugs easily corrupt the memory you need to find them

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score 23 · Answer 5

D

Top Pro

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

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

Top Con

Reference implementation not open source

Part of the reference compiler DMD was made at Symantec and cannot be relicensed. See More

qwedsa's Experience

HOLY CRAP I LOVE D See More

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

Top Pro

Implements all wanted features that C++ was missing

D was created as an improvement and replacement for C++. D implements all features that were long wanted and missing in C++, also all drawbacks of C++ were fixed. See More

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score 15 · Answer 6

Object Pascal

Top Pro

Supports reflection (Delphi)

Top Pro

Supports anonymous methods (Delphi)

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score 2 · Answer 7

Common Lisp

Ada

Top Pro

Highly tunable error checking

There are many error conditions. There can be tampering with containers, there can be integer overflow, there can be contract violation. Other programming languages suffer from "one size fits all" choice. You need checks - you pick one language, you want performance - you pick another language. Whatever language you pick, having written 1M LoC, you cannot undo your decision. Not in Ada. Ada is not only appealing by being able to check many conditions but also being able not to check them if requested so. Ada can be safe, Ada can be fast. No need to have multiple languages. Investments in Ada code are secure. See More

Top Con

Different libraries use different basic types

Is it possible for anyone to write custom string type? Yes, so let's do this. Is it possible for anyone to write custom container? Yes, so let's do this. This democracy comes at a cost. In some another programming language "a list of string" may virtually always be the same thing for mutually unaware developers, so you get two programming libraries and put them together, toll-free. In Ada this is very likely to not be true. Ada Web Server introduces custom containers, GNATCOLL introduces custom strings. Both libraries are maintained by same vendor. Writing glue conversion code is unfortunately required. See More

ArtisticHegemone's Experience

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score 3 · Answer 9

ATS

MicroPython

Top Con

Toy language

Answer 11

Golang.org

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score 2 · Answer 12

OCaml

Top Pro

Very capable type system helps avoid errors

The very strong yet flexible (you do not actually write the types, the compiler determines them) helps to prevent type related errors. See More

Specs

Current stable version:4.0.7

Price:Open source (Free)

Site:http://ocaml.org

License:LGPL version 2.1

See All Specs

Top Pro

Practical multi paradigm language

Ocaml is a functional language in first place but also supports an pragmatic imperative programming style (for..loops, etc) and objects. 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

Very fast compiled code

Almost in the C league (might in the end depend on the subject). See More

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score 1 · Answer 13

ParaSail

Red/System

Top Pro

Built-in support for concurrency

Red has built-in support for concurrency and multi-core CPUs. See More

Top Con

Not ready for production

Red is still on version 0.6.0. Which means that it still has some way to go before being used in production and in large projects. See More

score 1 · Answer 15

Myrddin

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score 4 · Answer 16

Swift

Top Con

Not really a systems programming language

Apple created this programming language to help software engineers develops apps. See More

Top Pro

Sensible language constructs

Swift developers have made the syntax easier for programming simple constructs such as equality and assignment. Many experts call this "syntactic sugar" but in this case, the proof is in the pudding. See More

Specs

Platforms:Mac

Top Con

Swift is a moving target

They've released 1.2 so far, and 2.0 is coming soon. Every small update brings adjustments to paradigms (such as how to do type casting) that can be a little frustrating to absorb. Objective C was also constantly updating, however, but not at the same rate these days. See More

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score 1 · Answer 17

Forth

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Answer 18

Pony

What are the best systems programming languages?

25 Options Considered

Nim

My Recommendation for Nim

My Recommendation for Nim

Very good performance

Still in pre 1.0

Strong metaprogramming capabilities

Unfinished (as of May 2018)

Concise

No big name backer

Best ratio of performance to programmer difficulty

Nim needs a lot more documentation

Static and safe type system

Garbage Collection Choices

Easy to read

Non-standard multithreading model

Compile-time execution

Type inferencing

Multi paradigm

Supports UFCS (Unified Function Call Syntax)

Great metaprogramming features

Strict typing

Really crossplatform

Built-in Unicode support

Easy to integrate with another languages

Has built-in async support

Has built-in unittest module

Garbage-collected

Very easy FFI

Very fast compile time

Type interferencing

Safe, race-free threading model

Python-like syntax

Open Source

Garbage collector is optional, we can mix GC and no-GC types in the same codebase

Grass-roots, community driven language

Smaller binary size

Rust

My Recommendation for Rust

My Recommendation for Rust

Built-in concurrency

Immature Tooling & Ecosystem

Dependency management

Nearly no standard API

Helpful compiler

Does not provide stable ABI yet

Generics support

Hard to find learning resources or libraries

Supports cross compilation for different architectures

Integer generics unsolved

Safe and Unsafe code session

Very new and untested

Makes developers write optimal code

Very ugly and verbose syntax

Advanced macros

Very hard to read

Threads without data races

Zero-cost futures or Async I/O

Compiles to machine code allowing for extra efficiency

Experienced developers can rapidly prototype & deliver products

Easy to write understandable code

Support for macros

C

My Recommendation for C

My Recommendation for C

Extremely efficient

Unsafe

Portable

Does not support modules; header file annoyances

Industry standard

Language is full of corner cases and undefined behaviors

Simple

Completely lacks type safety

Very compact

Lack of support for first class strings

Helps with learning other languages later

Understanding of computers

Low level of abstraction

Teaches good practices