What are the best systems programming languages?

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DevelopmentProgramming Language

What are the best systems programming languages?

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Feb 5, 2024

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Best systems programming languages	Price	Current stable version	Platforms
60 Nim	-	2.0.0	Windows, MacOS/iOS, Linux /Android/Termux, *BSD, Solaris/SmartOS, HaikuOS, lots of others
56 Rust	-	1.71.1	Linux, MacOS X, Windows, BSD
55 C	-	C'18	-
52 Go (Programming Language)	0	1.21.0	Windows, Linux, Mac etc.
-- V	Free	-	Windows, Linux, Mac

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score 162 · 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

Generics are a mess

Confused mishmash of conflicting ideas. 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:2.0.0

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

License:MIT

IDE Support:https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/editor-support

See All Specs

Top Pro

Strong metaprogramming capabilities

Macros, templates, and compile-time constructs allow DSL's and simplification of code. See More

Top Con

Memory management confusion

Multiple choices of garbage collection that causes confusion. Various times, nothing works particularly well. See More

DebonairAnbay's Experience

Slant's rankings are complete trash. Clearly Nim is given special treatment, where none of it's CONs show on it's main page. Disgusting bias and pretense, by presenting false fan rankings. Nim is a lowly player that few take serious and is of no consequence. See More

Top Pro

Best ratio of performance to programmer difficulty

If you want the best performance at any cost you of course go with C, but most of the time you want to maximize both performance and developer effort. Nim's benchmark results are almost equal to Rust, and well ahead of Go, Java, C#, etc. Nim's programmer difficulty is almost as low as Python. See More

Top Con

Whitespace sensitive syntax

Burns eyes and is ugly. See More

AwesomestLeto's Experience

Nim is a pretender, Mojo is the true contender. Mojo is a superset of Python, so can really transfer one's code over. With Mojo, no longer need C/C++, and defintely don't need preteners like Nim. Mojo developers work with and help the Python community, where Nim is just leeching off the name and popularity. It should have copied and leeched off Free/Object Pascal more, from which it actually came from. 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 Con

Non-standard multithreading model

Nim has very strict rules on memory sharing between threads, in order to keep garbage collection latency to a minimum. Message passing and copying must be used. This will be changed when ARC memory management model will become the default (as of 1.2.0 it's an experimental option). See More

Max Skybin's Experience

Very expressive without sacrificing performance See More

Top Pro

Concise

Nim programs are concise, but readable. See More

Top Con

You won't get a job programming with Nim

It's not a mainstream language. See More

MemorableJumis's Experience

Con artists pushing this false hype language on tricked Python addicts and on here. Nobody know this language, not even on TIOBE index. You not getting a job with this. Nobody need this language, not even for hobby, as others much better. See More

Top Pro

Really crossplatform

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

Top Con

Weird thread model

Not turned on by default. Has very odd and convoluted rules on memory sharing between threads. Harder to use. See More

FantasticLucina's Experience

Nim is a language where you can re-create the abstractions of any other language. You can have your code as high-level as Python and Ruby or as low-level as C and Assembly. And all of this while adhering to the zero-overhead principle. See More

Top Pro

Static and safe type system

Nim checks your code for type errors at compile-time. See More

Top Con

Lacks void / null safety

Easy to get involved in safety issues. See More

prohyon's Experience

Nim is the most powerful language that exist. 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 Con

Tooling not yet as good as the more commercial languages

Compared to languages such as C#, Nim lacks great IDE support. The debugging tools are somewhat inconvenient to use. 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 Con

Failed wannabe Python knockoff language

Created in 2008, Nim has failed to make TIOBE top 100 or PYPL rankings for programming languages. Pythoners can use alternatives like Cython or use the Codon compiler instead for a more Python-like experience. See More

Top Pro

Strict typing

Checks your code at compile time. See More

Top Con

Nim needs a lot more documentation

Details on features and how to use needs to be fully documented. See More

Top Pro

Very fast compile time

Also, recompiling is often faster than plain GCC. See More

Top Con

Version 1.0 just released (very new)

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

Top Pro

Has built-in async support

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

Top Con

Nim likely to be supplanted by Mojo

Strong arguments that Mojo will mostly surpass or overshadow Nim as a Python alternative. See More

Top Pro

Python-like syntax

Readable, clean and familiar to Python developers. See More

Top Con

Community harsh if criticized

If one dares to start a discussion about a feature on discord, subreddit or github then one will be aggressively shut down. See More

Top Pro

Multi paradigm

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

Top Con

Atrocious error messages

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

Top Pro

Smaller binary size

Binary sizes for a compiled program tend to be smaller than other languages. See More

Top Con

Garbage collection/threading blues

For version 1.1 or 2.0 or whatever they should make the language more clear in the choices for garbage collection. See More

Top Pro

Very easy FFI

Can easily import from C, C++, js with pragma. See More

Top Con

Garbage collection choices

Nim has multiple choices for garbage collection, and choosing which is best for your code may not be obvious. 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

Top Con

Inconsistent name formatting

Headache creation with snake_case, pascalCase, and being case-insensitive too. See More

Top Pro

Type inferencing

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 Con

Con artist pushed useless language

False hype con artist language pushed by tricking Python users. Nobody need this language, not even on TIOBE index top 100 list, but it came out 2008. You not get job knowing Nim. Bad for even hobby, others better to learn and use. 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

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

Top Pro

Open Source

Open Source reference compiler, standard library, and ecosystem. 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

Has built-in unittest module

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

Top Pro

Safe, race-free threading model

Safe, race-free threading model using the built-in disjoint check. See More

Top Pro

Strikes great balance between performance and productivity

While Nim is really fast, it is also elegant and productive. Optional GC, python-like synthax and minimal design all help you solve real world problems. See More

Top Pro

Grass-roots, community driven language

The development is not directed by a single, large company. See More

Top Pro

All in one language

Very capable of being used for any front-end and back-end needs. See More

Top Pro

Really cross-platform

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

Top Pro

Swift like memory management (ARC)

Plain reference counting with move semantic optimizations, offers a shared heap. It offers deterministic performance for hard realtime systems. See More

See All

score 137 · Answer 2

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:1.71.1

Platforms:Linux, MacOS X, Windows, BSD

License:MIT/Apache

Top Pro

Dependency management

Rust has a simple-yet-advanced, platform-agnostic build and dependency management system called Cargo. Cargo provides a convenient and near effortless means to distribute reusable packages called crates. One can even define Git repositories as dependencies. At the same time, use of this system is entirely optional and reliable alternatives--such as Bazel--are readily available. See More

Top Con

Does not provide stable ABI yet

The language does not provide stable ABI yet: different versions of the compiler may provide different backward-breaking machine code. There are a lot of things to be done before stabilizing the ABI. So if Rust-developers want to have stable ABI they use C one. As another result, every crate in Rust must be statically linked today. See More

Luke I. Wilson's Experience

Rust systems programmer for over a year. See More

Top Pro

Built-in concurrency

Rust has built-in support for concurrency. See More

Top Con

Significant time required to understand the language fully

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

PersistentNike's Experience

Rust is the kind of language that will drive you crazy enough to question your sanity or who you were born as. If you can or unless getting paid to abuse yourself, probably want to try something else. See More

Top Pro

Generics support

You don't have to write the same array and dictionary classes hundreds or thousands of times to get strong compile-time type checking. See More

Top Con

Very hard to read

The syntax is hard to read and very terse, which is bad for large code bases. See More

ImaginativeShennong's Experience

After spending signifcant time using this language, it hits as more hype and grift (for a select few) than really useful and productive. Then there is the 'Rust Evangelism' and 'Rust Foundation', which just comes across as bananas. Rust Foundation is like a drunk dictator, trying to force what we have never seen any other language try to do: 1) Prohibit firearms at their events. 2) No using "rust" in crate names. 3) No using "rust" in product or service name. 4) No using "rust" in domain or company name. 5) No using "rust" if user group or conference makes a profit. 6) Your trademarek must be bigger than theirs on your own website. 7) Must comply with local health regulations, because they say so. Rust is a low productivity, masochistically difficult, ugly syntax, long compile time, not so safe as hype suggests language. If really out here wanting to use something besides C/C++, in 98% of use cases, would do just as well or be better off using something other than Rust. Nim, Golang, Dlang, Vlang, Zig... See More

Top Pro

Supports cross compilation for different architectures

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

Top Con

Nearly no standard API

For nearly everything you will need to utilize a third party implementation (external crate). See More

ResourcefulShala's Experience

Most people do not need Rust. It will cause them too much wasted time in frustration, slow compiles, or outright confusion. Other memory safe(r) languages like Go, D, V, etc... are outright easier to use and as or almost as fast for tasks required. See More

Top Pro

Safe and unsafe code scopes

This mechanism ensures that if you stick with the safe code, there will be no memory issues. On the other hand, if you need (or want) to do something crazy, you totally can. See More

Top Con

Low readability

Harder to read and understand language. See More

Winnie Brockett's Experience

Rust is blazingly fast and memory-efficient: with no runtime or garbage collector, it can power performance-critical services, run on embedded devices, and easily integrate with other languages. See More

Top Pro

Makes developers write optimal code

Rust is a modern programming language written around systems; it was designed from the ground up this way. 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

Low productivity

The compiler is too strict, such as ownership and borrowing checkers. Great difficulty with getting projects completed. See More

Top Pro

Zero-cost futures or Async I/O

Top Con

Long compile times

Way longer to compile than other languages. See More

Top Pro

Functional Programming

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

Top Con

Rust not as safe as it pretends to be

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

Top Pro

Official package manager and build tool

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

Top Con

Very ugly and verbose syntax

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

Top Pro

Advanced, sanitary macros (a la lisp)

Macros facilitate code deduplication at a level unachievable with functions/classes/traits alone. Rust's macros are not like those from C/C++. They are safe, sanitary, and support strong-typing. Notable features include pattern matching, recursive invocation, and a small macro grammar (DSL). See More

Top Con

Very time consuming to write

Top Pro

Big community

The biggest community contributing to language. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

Pretty strict and hard to adapt for beginners. See More

Top Pro

Compiles to performant machine code

By leveraging LLVM as a backend, the Rust compiler produces efficient machine code from Rust sources. As a natural consequence, Rust programs and libraries tend to be (significantly) more performant than their interpreted contemporaries. See More

Top Con

Low-level programming language

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

Top Pro

Compiles to machine code allowing for extra efficiency

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

Top Con

Not as useful or productive as advertised.

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

Top Pro

Threads without data races

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

Top Con

Very new and untested

At this point, one can look at their Github page and see in the issues that Rust isn't as safe as it is claimed to be. Safety is only second to weird conversations about "harmful" features. Old unsafe bugs don't get solved while discussions about some language feature having problematic names get solved quite fast. Despite strong claims of "safety first", Rust is still choosing itself what its place actually is. If one were to follow "safety first", Rust is simply not a good option for now. See More

Top Pro

Experienced developers can rapidly prototype & deliver products

Out of all the systems languages, and even non-systems languages, Rust seems to make its users the most productive. This phenomenon is an increasing trend which is regularly reported by those who have gained enough experience with Rust to call themselves Rust programmers. Newcomers often struggle with the borrowing and ownership mechanism, lifetimes, traits, generics, and all manner of concepts and capabilities that Rust offers which their University of choice, or languages that they were familiar with, did not prep them for. Yet once you have learned these concepts and internalized them, the static analysis offered by the compiler becomes one of your greatest assets to your development. With the rules internalized, there is never a time where you will fight with the borrow checker. It will simply point out mistakes that you've made along the way, and are usually addressed within a minute or two. It also makes major refactoring simple. Once your project compiles, there's a pretty good chance that it will work correctly on the first try. Any issues you encounter throughout development will exclusively be basic logic bugs, rather than critical issues common of other systems programming languages. Cargo is also no slouch, and in combination with Crates.io, it is trivial to develop, publish, discover, and use crates from the official crate repository within each of your software projects. Any small problem which can be made generic or separate from a project will likely be chipped off and wrapped in a crate for others to use. These crates can then be collectively audited and put to use in the wild, in real time. This makes it possible to develop highly optimized data structures and routines, and then quickly propagate them across the entire industry. The performance is the cherry on top. A prototype is easily transformed into a final product with a bit of optimization. Rewriting entire portions of your architecture to be highly parallel with a fine degree of granularity is also simple, due to traits like Send & Sync ensuring that data is properly shared across thread boundaries, and the borrowing and ownership system which ensures proper memory access patterns across threads. 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

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

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

Top Pro

Guaranteed memory safety, better than Nim with error help

With the outstanding ownership and borrowing system, no garbage collector, efficiency, concurrency, and intuitiveness backing it all up, these features make Rust the greatest language for Systems programming, especially with its larger base than Nim. See More

Top Con

Working with mutable state is expensive performance-wise

Top Pro

Welcoming community full of talented engineers

The ecosystem of libraries is full of modular, ergonomic, and performant code written by many people smarter than I. It makes working with libraries a pleasant experience and one that is even better given Rust's notoriously friendly community. See More

Top Pro

Functional programming

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

Top Pro

Easy to write understandable code

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

See All

score 58 · Answer 3

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

PersistentNike's Experience

That really cool old guy that just get stuff done and amazes the younger folks with how he keeps doing it. See More

Specs

Current stable version:C'18

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

Typing discipline:static

Paradigm:imperative

See All Specs

Top Pro

Portable

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

Top Con

Lack of support for first class strings

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

CreativeAnuket's Experience

C is simple, fast... See More

Top Pro

Industry standard

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

Top Con

Language is full of corner cases and undefined behaviors

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

Top Pro

Simple

C has a very minimal syntax that makes it easy to pick up, create a compiler for and use. See More

Top Con

Arrays are not first class objects

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

Top Pro

Helps with learning other languages later

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

Top Con

Does not support modules; header file annoyances

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

Top Pro

Understanding of computers

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

Top Con

Completely lacks type safety

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

Top Pro

Very compact

C is compact and very fast. It is ideal for embedded programming, which requires only small resources. C is straight forward and very portable especially in a Unix environment. Most popular languages are descendant from C. C programmers do not requires any fancies like class, template or overloading, etc. Those not only make for confusion, but also bloat the object code. Efficient C code utilizes every bit of the machine it is running on. See More

Top Con

Only offers basic support for source code split into multiple files

Modern programming languages are capable of compiling split source code files by concatenating them together efficiently at compile time before compiling them. However, C requires the developer to resort to messing with header files and makefiles to get similar functionality. See More

Top Pro

Low level of abstraction

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

Top Con

Includes require obscene resources to compile

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

Top Pro

Teaches good practices

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

Top Pro

More control over the code

Top Pro

Pleasing to the programmer

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

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

Easy to drop down to assembly.

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

Top Pro

Portable between CPU architectures

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

Top Pro

C is simple with lesser rules than any other language

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

The king of languages, imitated, extended but never equalled

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

Top Pro

Ubiquitous

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

Top Pro

Easy to drop down to assembly

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

Top Pro

Foundational, difficult but important

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

See All

score 54 · Answer 4

Go (Programming Language)

Top Pro

Easy to install and configure; simple to compile software

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

Top Con

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

PersistentNike's Experience

For people that enjoy the easy lane, a good life, and being able to take vacations. 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

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. The workflow is comparable to that of a scripting language. See More

Top Con

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

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

ReverentZisa's Experience

Many years of Go development See More

Top Pro

Great language for building networking services

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

Top Con

Golang controlled by Google

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

Top Pro

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

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

Top Con

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

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

Top Pro

Automatically generates API documentation for installed packages

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

Top Con

Designed to make the programmer expendable

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

Top Pro

Exceptionally simple and scalable multithreaded and concurrent programming

Simply prepend a function with go to execute it concurrently. Utilizes channels for communication between goroutines which aids to prevent races and makes synchronizing threads effortless. The maximum number of threads to use may be defined at compile time, even if that is limiting goroutines to run on one thread. See More

Top Con

Easy to shadow variable

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

Top Pro

Golang is a systems programming language

See here. See More

Top Con

No classes

Go lacks classes which can become burden when you have to compose 15 different structs to solve the single problem. It also disallows a lot of abstraction that'd be easily solved using classes. 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 it's way into the language. The language is small enough to fit inside one's head without having to repeatedly open documentation. Documentation is hosted on an official webpage in a manner that is simple to read and understand. See More

Top Con

Doesn't have true enums

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

Top Pro

Supports 'modules' in the form of packages

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

Top Con

Does not have sum types

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

Top Pro

Performance is on the order of C and Java

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

Top Con

Emphasis recently shifted from tech to woke politics

Top Pro

C libraries available

Thanks to Cgo, it is possible to interface practically ale C libraries to Go. See More

Top Con

Lacks support for immutable data

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

Top Pro

No Class-based OOP

Uses more generalized OO concepts. Faster to write, easier to understand, and easier to troubleshoot. See More

Top Con

Hard to abstract even the simplest notions

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

Top Pro

Easy to install and configure; simple to compile software

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

Top Con

Implementation of interfaces are difficult to figure out

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

Top Pro

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

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

Top Con

No forms designer

For someone who's used to Visual Studio, Go lacks the luxury of having a forms designer for rapid development. 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

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

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

Built-in testing framework

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

Go get and Go fmt

You need a module, no problem, grab it via go get. On the other hand with other programming languages, you always have troubles with indentation and the in-house rules for writing brackets. go fmt solves this problem, and unifies the experience across the professional shops as well as freelancers. 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

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

Built-in unit testing

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

Top Pro

Provides tools for automatically formatting code for your entire software project

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

Top Pro

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

Fresh concept nowdays

The lang is written from scratch according to current hardware possibilities and what people expect from them. Can handle great both system-level scripts/tools and high-level complex network services. See More

Top Pro

Supports functional programming techniques such as function literals

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

See All

score 59 · Answer 5

V

Top Pro

Fast like C

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

Top Con

Rapid changes in a language syntax/features

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

TruthfulKunapipi's Experience

V has around a hundred releases (https://github.com/vlang/v/releases) is clearly not vaporware or a con. Slant is allowing lies, disinformation, defamation by competitors against the author. The language has hundreds of contributors and a book written on it (https://www.packtpub.com/product/getting-started-with-v-programming/9781839213434). See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

License:MIT

Site:vlang.io, https://github.com/vlang

Developer:Alexander Medvednikov

See All Specs

Top Pro

C Interop

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

Top Con

V 1.0 release was planned for December 2019

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

FascinatingAdapa's Experience

Crazies are being allowed to do insults, slander, and personal vendettas against developers. A language review and personal insults or false accusations are completely different things. Looks like the author of V will be able to sue Slant. People are discussing how clearly unfair the handling is of this case and the weird bias against the V language. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Compile to many OSes. See More

FantasticXquic's Experience

Easier to understand, read, and maintain. Very fast, like C++. See More

Top Pro

Simplicity

V is simple and powerful. See More

FlexibleQuetzalcoatl's Experience

I love V. I use V in everywhere. It's faster, easier and pretty good language. See More

Top Pro

Can create multi-OS GUIs

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

PersistentNike's Experience

The love child of Go and Rust, and grandson of C. See More

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Highly understandable language. See More

YUART's Experience

I think V - is just a best for for a system development, since it's an evolution of C with readable syntax. Toolset makes your life easier, and community is one of the best communities I have ever been part of 😄 See More

Top Pro

Sum types

V has Sum Types. See More

CooperativeYiDeokchun's Experience

Simple and fast See More

Top Pro

Generics

V has generics. See More

DynamicInua's Experience

esay to use, fast to compile See More

Top Pro

Closures

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

GloriousIllapa's Experience

Powerful and fast like C, but readable like Ruby or Python. Rapid progress and great community! See More

Top Pro

Safety

V is very safe. See More

UnderstandingDaichinTengri's Experience

The author of V is a con artist skilled at manipulating users into thinking that it is the fastest language or something that doesn't need any dependencies. There are a lot of DUMMY repositories in the language organization that mocks already existing services/apps, while promising that these outperforms those apps just because it is written in V. See More

Top Pro

Single paradigm

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

prohyon's Experience

Fast compilation time. See More

Top Pro

Supports concurrency and channels

Can run functions concurrently that communicate over channels. See More

Top Pro

Fast compile times

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

Top Pro

Friendly and helpful community

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

Top Pro

Inline assembly

Can add Assembly code. See More

See All

score 22 · Answer 6

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

Wrote several tricky traffic-editing proxies, forward and reverse ones. They run fast and operate megabytes of data per minute: parse JSON, patch it, serialize. Non-stop. Garbage collected solution would accumulate garbage at the speed of traffic. I also now make webservers in Ada. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, MacOS, embedded

Top Pro

Safety Critical Application, IOT

Top Con

Smart pointers are not built-in

ARC is indeed possible in a programming language having RAII and finalization, but programming language does not further assist to implement ARC. You got the tools, now you are on your own. Every programming language has an economic foundation. For C++, it's C compatibility, so problems arising from it are not going to leave. For Ada economic foundation is SPARK. What can be verified, is going to thrive. What cannot be verified, lacks attention. In SPARK until recently there were no pointers. Now they are going to be introduced, but they will be unique. Unique pointers means nothing to count, no reference counting. Implementing references (smart pointers) is verbose. Someone does it by hand, someone uses code generator from UML. See More

InquisitiveNibhaz's Experience

Lovely language. Gives me the power of a chainsaw but with kickback guards, cutoff switches, and other safety gear to lessen the chances of me cutting off my own leg accidentally (metaphorically speaking). See More

Top Pro

Catches integer overflows and range errors, but they don't start an apocalypse

Some "system" programming languages make it hard to catch integer overflows and range errors. Another ones advertise catching them, but what they forget to mention is that catching such error starts an apocalypse. A condition that is either impossible or hard to handle properly. Ada is designed by sane people. In Ada these ones are usual exceptions. Let us show 500 error, but please don't shutdown the whole webserver. No apocalypse today, thanks. See More

Top Con

C/C++ transpiler is stuck to Ada 95 revision

There are many developers still using Ada 95 compilers because there was no update for their hardware. They maintain libraries to be Ada 95 compatible. The hardware that can usually make one be locked to Ada 95 choice is rare (usually military) and has alternatives, but one special case is very notable. Current seller of Ada->C/C++ does almost nothing to improve compiler, so it's not moving anywhere. It stays on Ada 95 edition. This vendor is not known in Ada community, they are seemingly only collecting money from rent (they are not original developers). Better than nothing, but that's what we've got so far. Ada 95 is still very great, even compared to C++20. C++20 only recently got std::span, Ada's array parameters were like that since Ada 95. But all the hype stuff, all the list comprehensions will not be for you if you want to secure your time investments by making sure all your code can be compiled to C/C++ to run on any target. See More

Top Pro

Excellent module system

Ada is not a basketball game where any player can come and put ball into basket. Modules cannot go and put entities (constants, functions, types) into arbitrary namespaces. And there is no "root" namespace polluted by non-namespace aware "modules". No games here. Everything is well defined. Modules (packages) only put everything into their own namespace. Every entity is easily traced to its origin. Also, unlike some other system programming languages, "." is not for beauty. Packages have hierarchy. For instance, Ada.Text_IO.Stream_IO is allowed to provide stream interface to Ada.Text_IO because private part of Ada.Text_IO is accessible to children packages. This is more convenient access granting system than ones found in other programming languages. See More

Top Con

IDE not mature

Top Pro

Expressive types

Top Pro

Design by contract

Eiffel's killer feature without Eiffel's ultimate blocker. Design by contract - yes, tracing garbage collection - no. See More

Top Pro

Really hermetic type system

In some other programming languages Boolean(5) is an easy way to make Boolean value that is neither strictly True nor strictly False. Some programming languages don't even have this concept defined properly. Booleans, characters, numbers, everything is blurred, everything is shaking. Nothing shakes in Ada. In practice one is almost guaranteed to not ever stumble across invalid value. One is almost guaranteed that "Positive" value will indeed be positive and "Natural" value won't be negative. And it does not take much effort to support it, Ada programs are fast and slim, notably more efficient than some other programming languages pretending for safety, but failing to at least deliver strictly positive numbers. See More

Top Pro

Strongly typed generic containers

Top Pro

Almost any target is reachable using C/C++ compiler

There is a certified (ACATS validated) Ada compiler on top of C or C++ (actually 4 switches for fine tuning). It knows how to check integer overflow even if C/C++ compiler does not know. It can provide symbolic backtrace on almost any platform. With a special key generated C/C++ code whistleblows about entering and leaving functions. Just think about it. Your target may only have C compiler available. Yet if you get Ada, all integer operations are checked, and if exception happens, you have symbolic backtrace. RAII also works on top of C compilers. See More

Top Pro

RAII and finalization

Can you imagine living without it? See More

Top Pro

Traditional OOP

One does not have to figure out how to map familiar classes to haskellish traits or arithmetic types in Rust. One does not have to learn to put box into box, like in Go. Good or bad, comparably conservative OOP is here. Class hierarchies, abstract interfaces, they just exist when one does not want to experiment with alien technologies. Ada's OOP innovation is synchronized interfaces for tasks and Hoare monitors, but that is another story. See More

See All

score 30 · Answer 7

Zig

Top Pro

Some safety

It's safer than C, at least. See More

Top Con

Convoluted syntax

Claims to be an improvement over C, but in this area, not really. See More

CourteousEnkidu's Experience

I think Zig is just a very impressive & enjoyable programming language to build High Performance Softwares. Zig has very cool patterns, some of them are :- ➡️ Manual Memory Management ➡️ No Hidden Control flow ➡️ Great Error Handling ➡️ Simplified Testing ➡️ Integrated Build System ➡️ Awesome Data Primitives ➡️ Super Cool C & C++ Compiler ➡️ Simplified Interoperability with C & C++ Compiler ➡️ Magnificent Standard Library ➡️ Awesome & Super fast Compiler ➡️ Compile Time Code Execution See More

Specs

Current stable version:0.11.0

Platforms:Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Android, iOS

License:MIT

Site:https://ziglang.org/

See All Specs

Top Pro

C Interop

Zig programs can import C libraries and export header files to be used in C programs. See More

Top Con

No lambdas

Missing many key and useful features other languages have. See More

EncouragingInara's Experience

Highly unstable langauge, despite several years of development. Full of abrupt changes and lots of confusion. Can not maintain significant projects that use this language, without constant rewrites. Compile error full of useless information or fails to report. Confusing reference vs value. No built in regular expressions. Poor documentation. No standard package manager. See More

Top Pro

Performance

Zig is pretty fast, in some cases even faster than C. See More

Top Con

Deceptively gives impression it's near being production ready

No plans to hit 1.0 until 2025 (3 years later), according to Zig Roadmap speech. Impression is given that (0.9.1) language was close to ready, when it's not. See More

ResourcefulShala's Experience

Say no to Zig, avoid getting scammed. Why do we keep seeing an overhyped unfinished alpha level language showing up everywhere? That answer looks like a financial incentive to promote the language, the Zig Software Foundation, that is making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from donations. To aggressively maintain cash flow, it appears any opinions that goes against their narrative is suppressed, attacked, or eliminated. All while the hype machine runs rampant. That isn't a language for the people, that looks to be a cash grab for the few that will result in nothing useful. Save yourself the headache and games, better to just use C or other languages with C-like syntax, can interface with C, and are actually useful. Better to not waste your valuable time on crap like Zig, false media hype, or getting scammed. ”If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” This blog has published 2 excellent articles on how Zig's claims do not live up to reality after more than 6 years of development. https://mikefsn.github.io/2022/10/18/goodbye-zig.html https://mikefsn.github.io/2022/10/22/how-the-zig-team-pushes-a-narrative.html See More

Top Pro

Cross-compilation is easy

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

Top Con

Creator admits to not knowing what he's doing

Creator admits his shortcomings during Zig Roadmap speech. Very disturbing. Not a language to invest in or take seriously, outside personal experimentation. See More

Top Pro

Control flow is simple and obvious

No operator overloading, property methods, runtime dispatch, macros, etc. See More

Top Con

No closures

Does not have closures. See More

Top Pro

Small binary

Produces binary smaller than C. See More

Top Con

Almost no community

Lacking in libraries and users. See More

Top Pro

Compile-time execution

Zig can execute code at compile-time, allowing for more performant and readable programs. See More

Top Con

No interfaces/traits

Features that are useful are missing, where you can find them in other languages. See More

Top Pro

No Hidden Control flow

Zig will not do anything on your back that might slow down your program & make you loose your control over your program. See More

Top Con

Fundraising looks suspicious

Why do we keep seeing an overhyped unfinished alpha level language showing up everywhere? That answer looks like a financial incentive to promote the language, the Zig Software Foundation, that is making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from donations. To aggressively maintain cash flow, it appears any opinions that goes against their narrative is suppressed, attacked, or eliminated. All while the hype machine runs rampant. That isn't a language for the people, that looks to be a cash grab for the few that will result in nothing useful. Save yourself the headache and games, better to just use C or other languages with C-like syntax, can interface with C, and are actually useful. Better to not waste your valuable time on crap like Zig, false media hype, or getting scammed. ”If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” This blog has published 2 excellent articles on how Zig's claims do not live up to reality after more than 6 years of development. Article 1 Article 2 See More

Top Con

Poor compiler errors

Several years into development, language still a mess, and no hope of fixing itself for yet more years later. See More

Top Con

No standard package manager

Several years into development, and still no standard package manager is ridiculous. See More

Top Con

Exhibits cult-like behavior and animosity towards other programming languages

Strange culture that bashes other languages and are not open to criticism about the faults of their language. Very close-minded, sometimes scary. See More

See All

score 47 · Answer 8

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

Not widely used

ResourcefulShala's Experience

Real programming language, that does useful things, without media hype and false promises. A truly viable alternative to C or C++, that is here today and ready. See More

Specs

Current stable version:2.101.2

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

Lack of vision

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

qwedsa's Experience

HOLY CRAP I LOVE D See More

Top Pro

Easy to read and understand code

Top Con

All the downsides of garbage collection without any of its benefits

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

HonorableProserpina's Experience

Nice lambda syntax See More

Top Pro

Unit testing built-in

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

Top Con

Poor adoption even after many years of existence

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

Top Pro

Offers rdmd for compiled scripting

Because of the very fast compilation, D can very convinietly be used for scripting, too. No need to switch to an other language for prototyping either. See More

Top Con

Failed at becoming viable alternative to C or C++

Almost as complex and convoluted as C++, but lacking in popularity or corporate adoption. See More

Top Pro

Easy and powerful module systems

Since source files have a one-to-one correspondence with modules, you don't have to #include the text of a file of declarations, you only need to import the module. This way, there's no need to worry about importing the same module several times and no need to wrap header files with #ifndef/#endif. 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

Top Pro

Automatic & manual memory Management

D uses a garbage collector to manage memory. This eliminates the error prone process of manually allocating memory in languages that don't have a garbage collector. Despite this, the new and delete operations can be overridden for some classes to allow custom allocation. See More

Top Con

Now permissively licensed

Top Pro

Provable purity and immutability

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

Top Con

Garbage Collected

While optional, this uses a garbage collected runtime. See More

Top Pro

Extremely powerful user types

For example you can make your own type that behaves like a JavaScript variable (nice for using JSON based REST APIs) See More

Top Pro

Compile-time functions

D can run powerful functions totally at compile time. Lots of standard library code is implemented in such a way that it can be run at compile time. Almost any computational work can be done at compile time. See More

Top Pro

Very fast compilation

Huge project with dozens of source files like "dlangui" compiles in seconds. The DMD compiler can compile its own standard library, code generation backend (dmc++), and frontend from scratch within three minutes. See More

Top Pro

Has a very rich standard library Phobos

Phobos library is a part of standard compiler package. Phobos implements everything that standard C++ library has including structures and algorithms similar to C++ STL, also many extra features that you can find in C++ boost. See More

Top Pro

Designed for concurrency and parallelism

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

Top Pro

Faster than all c++ competitors

Top Pro

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

Top Pro

Has an open source implementation

D has at least two robust open source compilers: GDC ( gcc-based D compiler) and LDC (LLVM-based D compiler) See More

Top Pro

Easy to integrate with C and C++

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

Top Pro

Lots of powerful meta programming features

In D almost anything can be done in field of meta programming and self-reflection, there are many features in the language that allow easily to get information about anything that happens in the code. See More

Top Pro

Industrial quality

Top Pro

Memory safe language subset - SafeD

SafeD is a possibility for compiler to check functions not to use unsafe operations that can lead to memory corruptions, also bounds of structures are checked. Thus SafeD almost guaranties that your code will not corrupt memory and crash. See More

Top Pro

Great packaging and build system DUB

DUB simplifies compiling/building project of any complexity by specifying all project settings inside JSON build file, there you can list all source files and project folders, also list all necessary dependency packages and their versions. All public DUB packages are stored in DUB online registry (https://code.dlang.org/) and available for direct usage in your code. See More

Top Pro

Built-in Unicode support

Top Pro

Compile-time Function Execution

Top Pro

Powerful mixins mechanism

D has mixins that allow to generate and embed any code at compile time. This is a powerful replacement for macros in C++. See More

Top Pro

Has an improved C subset

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

Top Pro

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

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

Top Pro

Doesn't force you to deal with memory management

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

Top Pro

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

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

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

Top Pro

Generative programming

mixin template, UDAs, templates, -- these turn the compiler into a code generation tool that writes code for you See More

Top Pro

Easy to make reusable code by using ranges

D uses a type called range which provides a common interface to a sequence of values, therefore making it simpler to write code that works on arbitrary data, thereby making it reusable. See More

Top Pro

Static with type inference

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

See All

score 52 · Answer 9

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

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

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

Ryan Rillorta's Experience

Rapidly evolving, is getting more powerful and easier to use. Superior tooling. And very cross platform, it is found everywhere. See More

Top Pro

Multi-Paradigm

Supports procedural, object oriented, generic, and other paradigms. See More

Top Con

No cross-platform dependency management

C++ doesn't come with a platform independent dependency management system like Maven for Java, Nuget for .net or Cargo for Rust. Most solutions are platform specific, like Nuget for Visual Studio. In Linux the package management system is often used for c/c++ dependency management. (apt-get build-dep ...) See More

Top Pro

Class destructor support

Resource Acquisition Is Initialization is actually a term used in c++ to basically say it has destructors. Originally it is used to free class resources. But because class destructors are called guaranteed at the end of the scope of where a value is used, one can leverage this property to do all kinds of useful things which are not so nicely done in other languages. E.g. automatically close a file when it is not needed, close a socket, stop monitors, free resource handles etc. One does not need to remember to end a try-catch block with a finalize section, or call Dispose() on IDisposable class datamembers. See More

Top Con

Huge language gets in the way of learning

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

Top Pro

C code can be used in C++ code

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

Top Con

Rather useless compiler errors

An error in C++ can be a result of many things, so often the compiler doesn't have very useful advice about just what the problem is. Sometimes this can feel like the error is "IT BROKE" and the solution advice is "FIX IT". See More

Top Pro

Huge language supports most everything

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

Top Con

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

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

Top Pro

Powerful memory management

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

Top Con

Undefined behavior

Subtle errors can render the entire program "undefined" by the complicated C++ standard. The standard imposes no requirements in such cases. Thus C++ compiler writers are free to ignore the existence of such cases and Bad Things are prone to happen instead. Even experts can't reliably avoid undefined cases in C++, so how can beginners be expected to do so? See More

Top Pro

Excellent compiler optimization

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

Top Con

Tough to learn as the first language

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

Top Pro

Teaches problem solving

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

Top Con

Slow compilation

C++ is such a complicated language that compilers don't work very quickly. See More

Top Pro

Teaches fundamental OOP

Teaches you to leverage object oriented programming. See More

Top Con

Separate header files

One has to duplicate e.g. object interface declaration in header files. Making some object member public is not enough to make it accessible for other cpp files. However the feature request for module support is high on the wishlist. This would solve this issue. See More

Top Pro

Zero-cost abstractions

You can use somewhat high-level abstractions and still be quite sure that the code will run as fast as a low-level C implementation – not just in an asymptotic and/or average-throughput sense, but in fact exactly as fast and with no latency issues. See More

Top Con

Module system is not great

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

Top Pro

Supported by static analysis tools and safety standards

Top Con

Retains nearly all bad habits of C

Top Pro

Has lots of library

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

Top Con

A chaotic mingling of programming concepts

To give a similar picture: C++ does have more of a motor combustor, that is responsible to vaporize the gasoline. A bad principle corrected many times. At the end we have a complicated machinery that is a weird collection of a few genius ideas to make the whole thing work (templates (weird and a lot of history-driven pitfalls), now: lambdas (in a weird way), still a lot of exceptions in how compilers machinely set up the classes). Weird new rvalue mechanisms. Too much backward compatibility where all the old and erroneous stuff still exists, and the smart pointers emerge, and et cetera. Everything is just mingled together. And when you want to templatize your existing code, you have to start over from the beginning. Like Scott Myers said it: "C++ is a foundation of programming languages". Yes, a weird one. Result: your coding solutions do not scale. You do not know, where you end up in refactoring. See More

Top Pro

STD is often updated

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

Top Con

N different ways to do things -- most deprecated

C++ has retained every ancient feature in the name of compatibility. (Consider dynamic memory: malloc, then new, then smart_ptr, then unique_ptr and shared_ptr.) Which is great for old codebases, but now you're using libraries from every period that do things differently and lots of boilerplate are necessary to unify all of these. See More

Top Pro

Faster execution of the same algorithms

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

Top Con

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

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

Top Pro

Best way to understand algorithms

Top Con

No reflection

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

Top Pro

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

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

Top Con

Undefined behaviors and weak limited type safety

Undefined behavior in a program can cause unexpected results, making it hard to debug. With UB, program behavior may vary wildly depending on optimization settings. There are many cases that invoke UB, such as signed overflow, invalid dereferences, large integer shifts, uninitialized variables, etc. C++ allows for non-type safe operations such as logic errors, wild pointers, buffer overflow, etc. UB and type safety issues create a large number of bugs and security vulnerabilities. See More

Top Pro

Universal, portable, best complexity/efficiency trade-off

Top Con

C++ succumbs under its own weight

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

Top Con

Memory leaks and segmentation faults

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

Top Con

Complicated programs due to powerful template mechanism

Developers with advanced understanding of the template mechanism can create programs so arcane that they are hard to understand even for other professional c++ developers. See More

Top Con

No way to locate definitions

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

Top Con

Standard library missing important features

Top Con

Incomprehensible operator overloading resoution

Top Con

Duplicates C features in incompatible ways

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

Top Con

Exceptions incompatible with C++ manual memory management

Top Con

Arcane binding rules

Top Con

Complicated types

See All

score 32 · Answer 10

Object Pascal

Top Pro

Multiplatform (Delphi, FreePascal)

Works on all major desktop and mobile OSes, and more. See More

Top Con

Niche language

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

Marcus Fernström's Experience

Easily write cross platform systems tools, same power and low-level abilities as C or C++ but much easier to learn and work in, also the best GUI tooling I've ever seen. See More

Specs

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

Top Pro

Strongly typed

Top Con

No language standard

After the Wirth era, practically there is no official Pascal language standard. Delphi used to be the dé facto standard especially for industry, but today Free Pascal is starting to get better support. However, there are some other Pascal language variants such as Smart Pascal, Oxygene (from RemObjects), Pascal ABC, etc. that each has its own styles. See More

Top Pro

Clear syntax

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

Top Con

No up to date version of language standards

In 1983, the language was standardized, created two standards ISO/IEC 7185:1990 Pascal and ISO/IEC 10206:1990 Extended Pascal. Object Pascal extensions to the language are no official standards. Their are no standards for modern features and enhancements. Various Pascal dialects like Delphi or HP Pascal exist with their own enhancements and features. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

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

Top Con

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

Top Pro

Fast compilation

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

Top Pro

Easy GUI creation

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

Top Pro

Rich existing libraries

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

Top Pro

Language depth

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

Top Pro

Fast execution

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

Top Pro

Understanding of basics

Because of the verbosity and easy syntax, Pascal language is relatively easier to be learned and understood, even for someone who has no programming knowledge. It's said that Pascal code —if written well— is like reading pseudo code. Pascal / Object pascal was also used in schools during the 2000s to teach kids the basics of object oriented programming. See More

Top Pro

Enforces good programming practice

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

Top Pro

Extensive third party libraries

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

Top Pro

Reliable language and code base

Most code from the Turbo Pascal days in the 80s still compiles, yet the language has since been adapted and extended with modern concepts, introducing OOP and interfaces, exception handling, native Unicode support, anonymous methods, generics, ARC and more. See More

Top Pro

Assembler Code and DLL/SO creation

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

Top Pro

Flexible

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

Top Pro

Incredible GUI design tools

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

Top Pro

Available on a ridiculous number of platforms

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

Top Pro

Clear, simple syntax, no hidden behaviors

Top Pro

Tons of academic reading

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

Top Pro

Supports generics

Top Pro

Exceptional retrocompatibility

Top Pro

Well balanced for desktop development

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

Top Pro

Still active

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

Top Pro

Dynamic evolution of language

Top Pro

Supports reflection (Delphi)

Top Pro

Supports anonymous methods (Delphi)

See All

score 7 · Answer 11

OCaml

Top Pro

Encourages functional style

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

Top 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

OS:Linux, Windows, OSX, BSD

See All Specs

Top Pro

Actively-developed functional programming language at the forefront of research

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

Top 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

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

Top Pro

Very fast compiled code

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

Top Pro

One of the best for writing compilers

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

Top Pro

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

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

Strong editor integration

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

See All

score 8 · Answer 12

Common Lisp

Top Pro

Flexible, does not force you to a particular paradigm

Common Lisp can be a very flexible language. You can either follow functional paradigms and rules or you can go the imperative route. You can also use OOP because of the powerful Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). See More

Top Con

Too many implementations

There are a lot of Common Lisp implementations out there (CLisp, SBCL, CCL, just to name a few). Some implementations are free and open source, others are proprietary and cost quite a bit. Though none of them follow 100% the Common Lisp standard for example, SBCL fails about 50 official ANSI Common Lisp conformance tests. Having so many implementations it may be hard to develop new libraries because you would have to test it for several different implementations. 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 Con

Academic language, snobbish following

Not geared towards mainstream use. See More

Top Pro

Software written in Common Lisp can exceed C/C++ performance

Some CL implementations (most notably SBCL) with some careful design can surpass even C/C++ code in production when it comes to efficiency and speed. See More

Top Con

Esoteric syntax

While functional, the syntax isn't the easiest to pickup for most coders. See More

Top Pro

Portable

Common Lisp is very portable across multiple platforms. With a myriad of implementations available. See More

Top Pro

Lots of production-ready libraries available

Common Lisp is arguably the most useful Lisp to "get things done". One of the main reasons of this is the large community behind it and the large number of libraries and frameworks already built to solve virtually any problem you may have when writing programs to be used by actual users. 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

Top Pro

Very Powerful REPL with SLIME

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

Top Pro

Condition/restart system

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

See All

score 6 · Answer 13

Red/System

Top Pro

Built-in support for concurrency

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

Top Con

Doesn't work on 64-bit OSes

Still hasn't upgraded to be 64-bit OS compatible. See More

DedicatedSet's Experience

Was ahead of it's time, years ago, but development has stagnated and several newer languages have caught up. 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

See All

score 5 · Answer 14

ATS

Top Con

No Windows version

But it does run on Cygwin. See More

Top Pro

Safe concurrency

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

Top Pro

Good module system

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

Top Pro

High-performance systems language

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

Top Pro

Functional programming

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

Top Pro

Free and open-source compiler

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

Top Pro

Built-in formal specification

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

See All

score 2 · Answer 15

Vala

Top Con

A very naïve approach to the real problem

Vala just adds more complexity to the game. No real benefits in using a 'programming language emulator' for UI code, you may think it adds to productivity but it's just a way to make the problem last longer, reinventing the wheel everytime and worse. See More

Top Pro

C compatible API (and ABI)

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

Top Con

Not well documented

Top Pro

A general purpose language

Vala is compiled to C and only requires GLib - or even nothing (posix profile). See More

Top Con

Very limited tooling

Though using Gnome Builder, you can debug it easily. See More

Top Pro

Stable ABI

You can write a library with ABI stability. See More

Top Con

Not a general purpose language

Can't use Vala in multiple software development areas. See More

Top Pro

Easy syntax

Vala is syntactically similar to C# and includes several features such as: anonymous functions, signals, properties, generics, assisted memory management, exception handling, type inference, and foreach statements. See More

Top Pro

Well-integrated with C language

Vala itself is compiled to C, therefore it can use the vast ecosystem of C language, with least effort. See More

Top Pro

Fast

Underneath there is C. It makes some stuff easier to write than it would be with plain C code. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 16

ParaSail

Top Pro

Designed for parallel processing

Can evaluate subexpressions in parallel. See More

Top Pro

No garbage-collected global heap

Memory management is region-based. See More

Top Pro

No globals

Top Pro

Has both an interpreter and a compiler

Top Pro

Race conditions detected at compile time

See All

score 1 · Answer 17

Pony

Top Pro

Concurrency model based on actors

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

Top Con

Unstable API

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

Top Pro

High performance

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

Top Con

Limited tooling

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

Top Pro

Trivially simple C FFI

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

Top Con

Few libraries

Top Pro

Reliable

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

See All

What are the best systems programming languages?

24 Options Considered

Nim

My Recommendation for Nim

My Recommendation for Nim

Very good performance

Generics are a mess

Strong metaprogramming capabilities

Memory management confusion

Best ratio of performance to programmer difficulty

Whitespace sensitive syntax

Easy to read

Non-standard multithreading model

Concise

You won't get a job programming with Nim

Really crossplatform

Weird thread model

Static and safe type system

Lacks void / null safety

Supports UFCS (Unified Function Call Syntax)

Tooling not yet as good as the more commercial languages

Easy to integrate with another languages

Failed wannabe Python knockoff language

Strict typing

Nim needs a lot more documentation

Very fast compile time

Version 1.0 just released (very new)

Has built-in async support

Nim likely to be supplanted by Mojo

Python-like syntax

Community harsh if criticized

Multi paradigm

Atrocious error messages

Smaller binary size

Garbage collection/threading blues

Very easy FFI

Garbage collection choices

Compile-time execution

Inconsistent name formatting

Type inferencing

Con artist pushed useless language

Built-in Unicode support

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

Open Source

Garbage-collected

Has built-in unittest module

Safe, race-free threading model

Strikes great balance between performance and productivity

Grass-roots, community driven language

All in one language

Really cross-platform

Swift like memory management (ARC)

Rust

My Recommendation for Rust

My Recommendation for Rust

Helpful compiler

Integer generics unsolved

Dependency management

Does not provide stable ABI yet

Built-in concurrency

Significant time required to understand the language fully

Generics support

Very hard to read

Supports cross compilation for different architectures

Nearly no standard API

Safe and unsafe code scopes

Low readability

Makes developers write optimal code

Low productivity

Zero-cost futures or Async I/O

Long compile times

Functional Programming

Rust not as safe as it pretends to be

Official package manager and build tool

Very ugly and verbose syntax

Advanced, sanitary macros (a la lisp)

Very time consuming to write

Big community

Steep learning curve

Compiles to performant machine code