What are the best systems programming languages?

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Sep 20, 2018

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24 Options Considered

Best systems programming languages	Price	Current stable version	Site
85 Nim	-	0.18.0	https://nim-lang.org
83 Rust	-	1.29.0	rust-lang.org
81 C	-	–	–
62 C++	-	–	–
-- MicroPython	-	–	–

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score 41 · Answer 1

Nim

Top Pro

Very good performance

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

Top Con

Still in pre 1.0

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

abi akindele's Experience

Conciseness, innovative, performance and cross-platform capabilities See More

Specs

Current stable version:0.18.0

Site:https://nim-lang.org

License:MIT

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

See All Specs

Top Pro

Concise

Nim programs are concise, but readable. See More

Top Con

Unfinished (as of May 2018)

Still needs more polish, but it's getting better all the time. 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

Top Pro

Strong metaprogramming capabilities

Macros, templates, and compile-time constructs allow DSL's and simplification of code. 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 may change in the future. 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

Garbage Collected

But Nim has very good GC - you can tweak settings for real-time app for example 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 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 Pro

Static and safe type system

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

Top Pro

Easy to read

Nim has a lot of common with Python in terms of syntax. Indentation-based syntax, for/while loops. See More

Top Pro

Multi paradigm

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

Top Pro

Strict typing

Checks your code at compile time. See More

Top Pro

Has built-in async support

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

Great metaprogramming features

There are generics, templates, macros in Nim. They can allow you to write new DSL for your application, or avoid all boilerplate stuff. See More

Top Pro

Supports UFCS (Unified Function Call Syntax)

writeLine(stdout, "hello") can be written as stdout.writeLine("hello") proc add(a: int): int = a + 5 can be used like 6.add.echo or 6.add().echo() See More

Top Pro

Has built-in unittest module

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

Top Pro

Really crossplatform

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

Top Pro

Easy to integrate with another languages

You can use Nim with any language that can be interfaced with C. There's a tool which helps you to create new C and C++ bindings for Nim - c2nim Also you can use Nim with Objective C or even JavaScript (if you're compiling for these backends) See More

Top Pro

Garbage-collected

You don't need to deal with all those manual memory allocations, Nim can take care of it! But also you can use another GC, or tweak it for you real-time application or a game See More

Top Pro

Very easy FFI

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

Top Pro

Very fast compile time

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

Top Pro

Type interferencing

You only need to specify types in your procedures and objects - you don't need to specify type when you're creating a new variable (unless you're creating it without initialization). See More

Top Pro

Safe, race-free threading model

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

See All

score 48 · Answer 2

Rust

Top Pro

Built-in concurrency

Rust has built-in support for concurrency. See More

Top Con

Immature Tooling & Ecosystem

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

kungfu's Experience

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

Specs

Current stable version:1.29.0

Site:rust-lang.org

License:MIT/Apache

Top Pro

Dependency management

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

Top Con

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 Kali's Experience

Rust systems programmer for over a year. See More

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. 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

Top Pro

Generics support

You don't have to write same array and dictionary classes hundreds and thousands times for strong type check by compiler. See More

Top Con

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

Advanced 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. With support for pattern matching, recursive invocation and a small macro grammar. 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

Makes developers write optimal code

Rust is a modern programming language written around systems. It was designed from the ground up this way. Its language design makes developers write optimal code almost all the time, meaning you don't have to fully know and understand the compiler's source code in order to optimize your program. 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 it's stated otherwise. 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

Safe and Unsafe code session

This mechanism ensures that if you stick with the safe code, once compiled, there will be no memory issues. 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

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

Nearly no standard API

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

Top Pro

Zero-cost futures or Async I/O

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 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 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

See All

score 27 · 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

Specs

Price:Depends on Implementation, usually free

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

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

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

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

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

Simple

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

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

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 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 Pro

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

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

See All

score 30 · Answer 4

C++

Top Pro

Highly portable

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

Top Con

Atrocious complexity

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

penilloppee's Experience

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

Specs

Price:Depends on Implementation

Standard: ISO/IEC 14882 or C++17

Engine:UE4 , Cocos-2d-x

Top Pro

Powerful generic (meta) programming capabilities with templates

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

Top Con

Bugs easily corrupt the memory you need to find them

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

Slow compilation

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

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

C code can be used in C++ code

Most C code will work as C++ 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

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

Painfully slow compilation

Beginners need fast feedback 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

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

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

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

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

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 Pro

Powerful memory management

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

Teaches fundamental OOP

Teaches you to leverage object oriented programming. See More

Top Pro

Best way to understand algorithms

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

See All

score 3 · Answer 5

MicroPython

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score 14 · Answer 6

D

Top Con

Reference implementation not open source

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

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

Specs

Current stable version:2.076.0

Site:https://dlang.org/

Website:https://dlang.org/download.html

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

Top Pro

Easy to read and understand code

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

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 Con

Not widely used

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

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. See More

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

Not permissively licensed

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

Garbage Collected

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

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 Pro

Very fast compilation

Huge project with dozens of source files like "dlangui" compiles in seconds. 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

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

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

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 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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top Pro

Compile-time Function Execution

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

Built-in Unicode support

Top Pro

Industrial quality

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

Designed for concurrency and parallelism

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

See All

score 8 · Answer 7

Object Pascal

Top Pro

Multiplatform (Delphi, FreePascal)

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

Specs

Price:Depends on Implementation

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

Top Pro

Strongly typed

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

Clear, simple syntax, no hidden behaviors

Top Con

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

Top Pro

Supports generics

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

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

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 Pro

Clear syntax

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

Fast execution

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

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

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

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

Exceptional retrocompatibility

Top Pro

Supports reflection (Delphi)

Top Pro

Supports anonymous methods (Delphi)

See All

score 2 · Answer 8

Ada

Top Pro

Safety Critical Application, IOT

Top Con

IDE not mature

score 2 · Answer 9

OCaml

Top Pro

Very capable type system helps avoid errors

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

Specs

Current stable version:4.0.6

Price:Open source (Free)

Site:http://ocaml.org

License:LGPL version 2.1

See All Specs

Top Pro

Practical multi paradigm language

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

Top Pro

Sophisticated and easy-to-use package manager

OPAM is a package manager for OCaml, which is really easy to use, just like npm. It creates a .opam folder in home directory. The documentation is great as well, and you can switch between multiple versions of OCaml for each project. You can also package your project and publish it on OPAM repositories, even if the dependencies do not exists on OPAM. See More

Top Pro

Very fast compiled code

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

See All

score 1 · Answer 10

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 11

ATS

Top Pro

Safe concurrency

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

Top Con

No Windows version

But it does run on Cygwin. 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 3 · Answer 12

Red/System

Top Pro

Built-in support for concurrency

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

Top Con

Not ready for production

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

score 1 · Answer 13

Myrddin

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score 4 · Answer 14

Swift

Top Con

Not really a systems programming language

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

Top Pro

Sensible language constructs

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

Top Con

Swift is a moving target

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

See All

score 1 · Answer 15

Forth

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Answer 16

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

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 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

See All

Answer 17

Pony

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

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

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

Limited tooling

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

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

Top Con

Few libraries

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

See All

score 1 · Answer 18

PicoLisp

Top Pro

Objects are dynamic

Objects can be manipulated even after they've been created, thanks to the "slots" having such flexibility. See More

Top Pro

Simple to understand

There are only 3 types of data in PicoLisp - numbers, symbols, and lists. This makes it less confusing than other systems programming languages that have other types in addition to these. See More

24 Options Considered

My Recommendation for Nim

My Recommendation for Nim

Very good performance

Still in pre 1.0

Concise

Unfinished (as of May 2018)

Strong metaprogramming capabilities

Non-standard multithreading model

Best ratio of performance to programmer difficulty

Garbage Collected

Compile-time execution

Type inferencing

Static and safe type system

Easy to read

Multi paradigm

Strict typing

Has built-in async support

Built-in Unicode support

Great metaprogramming features

Supports UFCS (Unified Function Call Syntax)

Has built-in unittest module

Really crossplatform

Easy to integrate with another languages

Garbage-collected

Very easy FFI

Very fast compile time

Type interferencing

Safe, race-free threading model

My Recommendation for Rust

My Recommendation for Rust

Built-in concurrency

Immature Tooling & Ecosystem

Dependency management

Does not provide stable ABI yet

Helpful compiler

Integer generics unsolved

Generics support

Hard to find learning resources or libraries

Advanced macros

Very new and untested

Makes developers write optimal code

Very ugly and verbose syntax

Safe and Unsafe code session

Very hard to read

Threads without data races

Nearly no standard API

Supports cross compilation for different architectures

Easy to write understandable code

Zero-cost futures or Async I/O

Support for macros

Compiles to machine code allowing for extra efficiency

Experienced developers can rapidly prototype & deliver products

My Recommendation for C

My Recommendation for C

Extremely efficient

Unsafe

Portable

Language is full of corner cases and undefined behaviors

Industry standard

Does not support modules; header file annoyances

Simple

Completely lacks type safety

Very compact

Lack of support for first class strings

Helps with learning other languages later

Understanding of computers

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

My Recommendation for C++

My Recommendation for C++

Highly portable

Atrocious complexity

Powerful generic (meta) programming capabilities with templates

Bugs easily corrupt the memory you need to find them

Multi-Paradigm

Slow compilation

Class destructor support

Rather useless compiler errors

C code can be used in C++ code

No cross-platform dependency management