What are the best systems programming languages?

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30 Options Considered

Best systems programming languages	Price	Current stable version	Price
87 Rust	-	1.4.0	Free
86 Nim	-	1.0.4	-
83 C	-	C'18	Depends on Implementation, usually free
-- Go (Programming Language)	0	1.12.1 / February 25, 2019	-
66 C++	-	-	Depends on Implementation

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score 81 · Answer 1

Rust

Top Pro

Helpful compiler

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. The compiler usually gives good explanations about what you did wrong and sometimes even proffers ways to fix things. See More

Top Con

Integer generics unsolved

Although Rust supports generics, it does not yet support integer generics. Crates exist to alleviate issues with this, but the ultimate solution has yet to be done. This also affects generics with fixed-size arrays, although array slices are easily used as a workaround. 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:1.4.0

Price:Free

Site:rust-lang.org

License:MIT/Apache

Top Pro

Makes developers write optimal code

Rust is a modern programming language written around systems; it was designed from the ground up this way. The language design coerces developers into writing optimal code almost all the time and enables optimization of your program without requiring full knowledge and understanding the compiler's source code or the internals and quirks of your target processor(s)/architecture(s). Furthermore, Rust does not copy from memory unnecessarily, to give an example: all types move by default and not copy. Even references to types do not copy by default. In other words, setting a reference to another reference destroys the original one unless stated otherwise. See More

Top Con

Does not provide stable ABI yet

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score 84 · Answer 2

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

Version 1.0 just released.

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:1.0.4

Site:https://nim-lang.org

C

Top Pro

Extremely efficient

The C language's mentality is to trust the programmer. With all great powers comes great responsibilities. C allows you to harness the full power of the underlying hardware. No garbage collection is a blessing, not a curse. It forces the programmer to be aware of what he's writing. It's similar to getting frustrated with spoken languages because they don't have built-in autocorrect. Although it's easier to brainlessly write a text and let autocorrect do the work for you, you won't become better in the language this way, nor will you be able to better express yourself because you don't have to think about the grammar of the language. Having to think about resources and how to best implement everything, coupled with the relatively low-level of C in general. Makes C programs extremely efficient and fast. See More

Top Con

Unsafe

C makes it extremely easy to make mistakes. Your language should help you be productive by abstracting mistakes away from you. See More

Specs

Current stable version:C'18

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

Top Pro

Basic concepts can be applied to accelerate learning any other language

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

Top Pro

Must-have

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

Top Pro

The king of languages, imitated, extended but never equalled

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

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score 16 · Answer 4

Go (Programming Language)

Top Pro

Golang is a Systems Programming Language

https://www.quora.com/Is-Go-a-systems-programming-language See More

Top Con

Performance slowdown because of indirect calls and garbage collection

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

Specs

Current stable version:1.12.1 / February 25, 2019

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac etc.

GZipped size:217 mb

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

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

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score 41 · Answer 5

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 33 · Answer 6

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 is now open source

Part of the reference compiler DMD was made at Symantec, and is now open-source and available for everyone to use freely. See More

HonorableProserpina's Experience

Nice lambda syntax See More

Specs

Current stable version:2.076.0

Site:https://dlang.org/

Top Pro

Provides templates to support generic programming

D templates offer a clean way to support generic programming while offering the power of partial specialization. Template classes and template functions are available, along with variadic template arguments and tuples. See More

Top Con

Poor adoption even after many years of existence

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score 20 · Answer 7

Object Pascal

Top Pro

Multiplatform (Delphi, FreePascal)

Top Con

Niche language

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

Marcus Fernström's Experience

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score 5 · Answer 8

Crystal

Top Pro

Elegant syntax as Ruby

SuccessfulTranquillitas's Experience

i've used in developing web service for mobile app See More

Specs

Platforms:Linux

Website:https://crystal-lang.org/

Top Pro

Fast performance

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Easy for beginners and easy implementation. See More

Top Pro

Compiles to native binary

Top Pro

Has co-routine

See All

score 5 · Answer 9

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 2 · Answer 10

Common Lisp

Elixir

Top Pro

Scalability

Elixir programming is ideal for applications that have many users or are actively growing their audience. Elixir can easily cope with much traffic without extra costs for additional servers. More details can be found here. See More

Top Con

Some design choices may seem strange

Some design choices could have been a little more appealing, for example: using "do...end" comes natural in Ruby for blocks but Elixir uses them for everything and it looks pretty weird: Enum.map [1, 2, 3], fn(x) -> x * 2 end or receive do {:hello, msg} -> msg {:world, msg} -> "won't match" end See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.9.4

Price:Open source (Free)

Site:https://elixir-lang.org

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

See All

score 3 · 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

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

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score 2 · Answer 13

Zig

The Zig compiler can build artifacts for any Tier 3 Supported platform without additional downloads. See More

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score 6 · Answer 14

Forth

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score 4 · Answer 15

ATS

Vala

Top Pro

C compatible API (and ABI)

C programs can use libraries written in Vala, and vice versa. See More

Specs

MicroPython

Top Pro

Easy and with great potential

Easy of python with small microcontrollers. See More

Top Con

Toy language

score 5 · Answer 18

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, Linux

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 19

ParaSail

What are the best systems programming languages?

30 Options Considered

Rust

My Recommendation for Rust

My Recommendation for Rust

Helpful compiler

Integer generics unsolved

Makes developers write optimal code

Does not provide stable ABI yet

Dependency management

Immature Tooling & Ecosystem

Generics support

Nearly no standard API

Built-in concurrency

Hard to find learning resources or libraries

Supports cross compilation for different architectures

Very new and untested

Zero-cost futures or Async I/O

Very hard to read

Advanced, sanitary macros (a la lisp)

Very ugly and verbose syntax

Safe and Unsafe code scopes

Threads without data races

Compiles to performant machine code

Experienced developers can rapidly prototype & deliver products

Easy to write understandable code

Support for macros

Official package manager and build tool

Big community

Compiles to machine code allowing for extra efficiency

Functional Programming

Guaranteed memory safety, better than Nim with error help

Nim

My Recommendation for Nim

My Recommendation for Nim

Very good performance

Version 1.0 just released.

Strong metaprogramming capabilities

No big name backer

Concise

Nim needs a lot more documentation

Best ratio of performance to programmer difficulty

Non-standard multithreading model

Static and safe type system

Garbage Collection Choices

Easy to read

Garbage Collection/Threading Blues

Compile-time execution

Type inferencing

Multi paradigm

Supports UFCS (Unified Function Call Syntax)

Really crossplatform

Strict typing

Has built-in async support

Easy to integrate with another languages

Built-in Unicode support

Has built-in unittest module

Very easy FFI

Very fast compile time

Python-like syntax

Open Source

Garbage-collected

Safe, race-free threading model

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

Smaller binary size

Grass-roots, community driven language

Strikes great balance between performance and productivity

Really cross-platform

C

My Recommendation for C

My Recommendation for C

Extremely efficient

Unsafe

Portable

Language is full of corner cases and undefined behaviors

Industry standard

Does not support modules; header file annoyances

Simple

Lack of support for first class strings

Very compact