What are the best languages to write a desktop Linux application in?

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DevelopmentLinux

What are the best languages to write a desktop Linux application in?

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Dec 24, 2023

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20 Options Considered

Best languages to write a desktop Linux application in	Price	Platforms	Current stable version
-- Gambas	Free	Linux	3.18.2
54 Python	Free	Windows, Linux, macOS, AIX, IBM i, iOS, z/OS, Solaris, VMS	3.9.1
54 Qt / C++	Free / paid	-	-
52 Vala	-	-	-
-- Rust	-	Linux, MacOS X, Windows, BSD	1.71.1

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score 68 · Answer 1

Gambas

Top Pro

Complete IDE for GUI development

You can't find such a level of easy GUI development in any other language on the Linux platform. See More

Top Con

Not cross platform

ExceptionalLuDongbin's Experience

Easy to use best IDE for GUI building See More

Specs

Platforms:Linux

Current stable version:3.18.2

Top Pro

Constantly updated

New features and bug fixes along with performance enhancements. See More

Top Con

The documentation is not the best

ProductiveLevana's Experience

We use it in a small company for: Desktop applications that do local calculations and/or handle data from mysql/mariadb database. Scripts (without graphical environment) run as shell scripts to do summary calculations on database data or collect data running on a Raspberry Pi. Libraries with common objects (for internal company use) in Gambas desktop apps. See More

Top Pro

Easy to get started for someone familiar with VB on Windows

Top Con

May have trouble interfacing to C code structs

Managed struct objects in Gambas makes it harder to use with C code structs. See More

LogicalTengri's Experience

Very intuitive wysiwyg form designer with tons of features and many useful components. It knocks all other IDEs out of the park for ease of use. See More

Top Pro

Complete application development suite

Supports GTK and QT along with web. Built in Form building with JIT speed. If you are developing an application targeting Linux only give this a look. See More

Top Con

Difficult to satisfy runtime requirements

Runtime requirements to run applications written in Gambas are not always easy to satisfy (that is, without installing the whole development environment). See More

DedicatedDaikokuten's Experience

Nothing else I can find has an IDE as good as Gambas. The ability to create GUI programs by just dragging one of the many tools such as a button on to a form, simple. See More

Top Pro

Fast to write apps

DazzlingGibil's Experience

20 Year of using Gambas on my own internal products without fails. The most easy to use GUI ever done See More

Top Pro

Git integration

Integration with GIT in IDE and easy to distribute apps as source package with export as .tar.gz. See More

FerventEnyo's Experience

We use it for all our in-house development, and even for some servers scripts (can be used without graph environment). See More

Top Pro

Enhanced with a new test suite

LoyalIoke's Experience

Easy and quick develop of desktop apps and web based apps. Many, many components, being the latest a complete test suite. See More

Top Pro

Runs on Windows 10 WSL2 environment, reported successful compilation on MacOS

MotivatedErlangShen's Experience

very easy and full GUI IDE See More

ReverentLahmu's Experience

Professional programmer See More

SpontaneousPriapus's Experience

C, C++, VB6, VB.Net. C# See More

ColorfulNane's Experience

The built in IDE allows for the creation of smart looking programs without the need for masses of code. If you know BASIC then this is the next step. See More

TactfulMethe's Experience

I wanted BASIC and an IDE, I could not find anything else out there. See More

See All

score 39 · Answer 2

Python

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Great syntax, easy to learn, easy to set up the dev. environment, many editors support it, has GTK bindings for GUI, etc. See More

Top Con

The process of shipping/distributing software is relatively complicated

Once you program the process of having a way to send it to others to use is fragile and fragmented. Python is still looking for the right solution for this with still differences in opinion. These differences are a huge counter to Python's mantra of "There is one correct way to do something." See More

Distracted's Experience

I am See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, macOS, AIX, IBM i, iOS, z/OS, Solaris, VMS

Current stable version:3.9.1

GZipped size:22.5MB

Typing discipline:Dynamically typed

See All Specs

Top Pro

Can be used in many domains

Python can be used across virtually all domains: scientific, network, games, graphics, animation, web development, machine learning, and data science. See More

Top Con

Too opinionated for a general-purpose programming language

While it's a good language to learn and use after you have mastered a couple of other less rigid programming languages, it's definitely not good for first-time learners. Both the language itself and its community have made it quite clear that you should do everything the "Pythonic way" to get the best results, that it feels more like an opinionated framework instead of a general-purpose programming language, which means if you are a first-time learner and getting too "tuned" to the "Pythonic way" it will be much harder for you to learn other less-opinionated languages compared to the other way around. Like any programming languages and/or frameworks, I'd recommend first-time learners to learn less opinionated ones first to open up your mind, then learn some of the more opinionated ones to increase productivity for specific fields of works. After all, programming languages are just some utilities for the human mind to interface with the computers, and there are more suitable tools for different tasks, and you should master the "Pythonic way" (after you already have adequate experience in computer programming) instead of locking your mind too close to the "Pythonic way" as a first-time learner. See More

ThriftyAmaterasu's Experience

Horrible experience with python language. Ugly and very convoluted. Strange syntax is difficult to read and follow. lots of the code is poorly written and does not work as advertised. See More

Top Pro

GTK support through PyGObject

GTK has official bindings to Python, which makes it relatively easy to use for GTK development. See More

Top Con

Speed can matter

Python, like many interpreted and untyped languages, is fairly slow compared to compiled languages like C, C++ or Java. Sometimes this won't matter, but when it does you're talking about twenty times slower than C/C++ and ten times slowed than Java. See More

Top Pro

Widely available

The majority of linux distributions come with python preinstalled, so your program will work without any dependency installation See More

Top Con

Limited support for functional programming

While Python imports some very useful and elegant bits and pieces from FP (such as list comprehensions, higher-order functions such as map and filter), the language's support for FP falls short of the expectations raised by included features. For example, no tail call optimisation or proper lambdas. Referential transparency can be destroyed in unexpected ways even when it seems to be guaranteed. Function composition is not built into the core language. Etc. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Installs and works on every major operating systems if not already installed by default (Linux, macOS). See More

Top Con

Arch Linux Python system applications breaks when you upgrade python

More details can be seen here and here See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

The Python community has put a lot of work into creating excellent documentation filled with plain english describing functionality. Contrast this with other languages, such as Java, where documentation often contains a dry enumeration of the API. As a random example, consider GUI toolkit documentation - the tkinter documentation reads almost like a blog article, answering questions such as 'How do I...', whereas Java's Swing documentation contains dry descriptions that effectively reiterate the implementation code. On top of this, most functions contain 'Doc Strings', which mean that documentation is often immediately available, without even the need to search the internet. See More

Top Con

Packaging can be a nightmare

Packaging is always a nightmare imo, but with Python there have been so many changes and deprecations. DistUtils has been removed. Now setup.py and setup.cfg is deprecated, and the Debian tools for building packages have their own compatibility issues adding pain on top of these. See More

Top Pro

Lots of tutorials

Python's popularity and beginner friendliness has led to a wealth of tutorials and example code on the internet. This means that when beginners have questions, they're very likely to be able to find an answer on their own just by searching. This is an advantage over some languages that are not as popular or covered as in-depth by its users. See More

Top Con

Painful to manage system dependencies

If you want to make a desktop application as a system package like Debian, you have no control of the system python version. So you end up having to support very old Python version for LTS Ubuntu while also having to ensure compatibility with the newest versions for rolling release distros like Arch. And you also can only use the dependencies and the versions of the dependencies the system supports. Furthermore development tools like mypy, pytest etc have gistorically stopped supporting old python version before Ubuntu LTS does, making it painful for this reason also. Note that Flatpak solves this, by using vendored dependencies and pyenvs, assuming you can use it and don't want to support anything else. See More

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Python's syntax is very clear and readable, making it excellent for beginners. The lack of extra characters like semicolons and curly braces reduces distractions, letting beginners focus on the meaning of the code. Significant whitespace also means that all code is properly and consistently indented. The language also uses natural english words such as 'and' and 'or', meaning that beginners need to learn fewer obscure symbols. On top of this, Python's dynamic type system means that code isn't cluttered with type information, which would further distract beginners from what the code is doing. See More

Top Con

Bad for games

Python has a lot of frameworks like pygame, but exporting the game is hard and building files like .exe gets very large and have a bad performance on bad computers. See More

Top Pro

It's really simple

It's very simple for understanding how programming works. See More

Top Con

Significant whitespace

While proper formatting is essential for any programmer, beginners often have trouble understanding the need and lack the discipline to do it. Add to that all those editors that randomly convert N spaces (usually 8) to tabs and you get an instant disaster. See More

Top Pro

Best chances of earning most money

According to Quartz, Python programming skills on average earn $100,000 per year. Closely followed by Java, C++, JavaScript, C, and R with $90,000 per year and above. See More

Top Con

Not good for mobile development

You can use frameworks like Kivy, but if your ultimate goal is to write mobile apps Python may not be the best first choice. See More

Top Pro

Easy to get started

On top of the wealth of tutorials and documentation, and the fact that it ships with a sizeable standard library, Python also ships with both an IDE (Integrated Development Environment: A graphical environment for editing running and debugging your code); as well as a text-based live interpreter. Both help users to get started trying out code immediately, and give users immediate feedback that aids learning. See More

Top Con

Inelegant and messy language design

The first impression given by well-chosen Python sample code is quite attractive. However, very soon a lack of unifying philosophy / theory behind the language starts to show more and more. This includes issues with OOP such as lack of consistency in the use of object methods vs. functions (e.g., is it x.sort() or sorted(x), or both for lists?), made worse by too many functions in global name space. Method names via mangling and the init(self) look and feel like features just bolted on an existing simpler language. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn, More to Go

It is very easy to learn and it has community support and many categories available. See More

Top Con

Language fragmentation

A large subset of the Python community still uses / relies upon Python 2, which is considered a legacy implementation by the Python authors. Some libraries still have varying degrees of support depending on which version of Python you use. There are syntactical differences between the versions. See More

Top Pro

Comes with extensive libraries

Python ships with a large standard library, including modules for everything from writing graphical applications, running servers, and doing unit testing. This means that beginners won't need to spend time searching for tools and libraries just to get started on their projects. See More

Top Con

Relatively slow

Since Python is an interpreted language, the performance will be obviously worse than of a native program. See More

Top Pro

Advanced community projects

There are outstanding projects being actively developed in Python. Projects such as the following to name a random four: Django: a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. iPython: a rich architecture for interactive computing with shells, a notebook and which is embeddable as well as wrapping and able to wrap libraries written in other languages. Mercurial: a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface. PyPy: a fast, compliant alternative implementation of the Python language (2.7.3 and 3.2.3) with several advantages and distinct features including a Just-in-Time compiler for speed, reduced memory use, sandboxing, micro-threads for massive concurrency, ... When you move on from being a learner you can still stay with Python for those advanced tasks. See More

Top Con

Abstraction to the point of hinderance

Python is abstracted far enough that if it's your first language, it will be harder to pick up lower level languages later versus going the other direction. See More

Top Pro

Supports various programming paradigms

Python supports three 'styles' of programming: Procedural programming. Object orientated programming. Functional programming. All three styles can be seamlessly interchanged and can be learnt in harmony in Python rather than being forced into one point of view, which is helpful for easing confusion over the debate amongst programmers over which programming paradigm is best, as developers will get the chance to try all of them. See More

Top Con

Unflexible userbase

You will be expected to rigidly stick to the coding practices and to do everything by-the-numbers. See More

Top Pro

Good introduction to datatypes

Python's built-in support and syntax for common collection types such as lists, dictionaries, and sets, as well as supporting features like list comprehensions, foreach loops, map, filter, and others, makes their use much easier to get into for beginners. Python's support for Object Orient Programming, but with dynamic typing, also makes the topic of Data Structures much more accessible, as it takes the focus off of more tedious aspects, such as type casting and explicitly defined interfaces. Python's convention of only hiding methods through prefacing them with underscores further takes the focus off of details such as Access Modifiers common in languages such as Java and C++, allowing beginners to focus on the core concepts, without much worry for language specific implementation details. See More

Top Con

It is best suited for scripting, but so are many other languages.

i.e. running js as a script in a node is trivial. Even languages that were not meant to run as a script are easy to use as a scripting language with just a .sh file. See More

Top Pro

Active and helpful community

Python has an active and helpful community, such as the comp.lang.python Google Groups, StackOverflow, reddit, etc. See More

Top Con

Version Confusion with V2.x and V3.x

Top Pro

Easy to find jobs

Python's popularity also means that it's commonly in use in production at many companies - it's even one of the primary languages in use at Google. Furthermore, as a concise scripting language, it's very commonly used for smaller tasks, as an alternative to shell scripts. Python was also designed to make it easy to interface with other languages such as C, and so it is often used as 'glue code' between components written in other languages. See More

Top Con

Does not teach you about data types

Since Python is a dynamically typed language, you don't have to learn about data types if you start using Python as your first language. Data types being one of the most important concepts in programming. This also will cause trouble in the long run when you will have to (inevitably) learn and work with a statically typed language because you will be forced to learn the type system from scratch. See More

Top Pro

Has many libraries for scientific computing, data mining and machine learning

Python is commonly used in data science and has many libraries for scientific computing, such as numpy, pandas, matplotlib, etc. See More

Top Con

Worst language design ever

Instead of sticking to a certain paradigm, the original writer of the language couldn't make up his mind, and took something from everywhere, but messing it up as he went by. This is possibly one of the worst balanced languages ever. People who pollute their mind with Python and think it's the next best thing after sliced bread, will have to un-learn a lot of garbage 'pythonesque' habits to actually learn how to program. It's not because the academic world uses it a lot, that it's a good language. It says something about the inability of the academic world to write decent code, actually. See More

Top Pro

Has features of both high and low level language

It is somewhere between C and Java. See More

Top Con

Might not be very future-proof

Lots of features that will probably be crucial as time goes (good support for parallelism for example) are missing or are not that well-supported in Python. See More

Top Con

Hard to debug other people's code

As the structure of Python code is based on conventions many developers are not following them and so it is difficult to follow/extract the design of not trivial application from the code. See More

Top Con

Slow to run

Check for example the first result from Google. See More

Top Con

Multi-threading can introduce unwanted complexity

Although the principals of multi-threading in Python are good, the simplicity can be deceptive and multi-threaded applications are not always easy to create when multiple additional factors are accounted for. Multi-thread processes have to be explicitly created manually. See More

See All

score 41 · Answer 3

Qt / C++

Top Pro

Good documentation

Professional, thorough documentation with examples, available either in a web browser or in the stand-alone desktop client called assistant. See More

Top Con

Not free/expensive

Free version is limited and prohibitive. See More

Specs

License:LGPL (for open source)

Price:Free (for open source)

Top Pro

Portable

Linux, BSD, Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Blackberry ... Qt has 'em all. See More

Top Pro

Global community

The community behind Qt is both massive and approachable. Digia (also owners) are joined by the likes of Intel, KDAB, ICS, Canonical and numerous others in sponsoring development, while communities such as KDE also contribute significantly. Forums are active, mailing lists are open, irc channels chatting, git repositories well managed. Answers to questions are usually minutes away. See More

Top Pro

QML

QML is "HTML5 done right": a declarative language that integrates beautifully with C++ code when necessary and exposes the power of the GPU ... simply the best way to create a modern GUI in terms of effort and results. See More

Top Pro

LGPL license

Top Pro

Open Source

Qt is licensed under a OSS license through a dual-license policy. See More

See All

score 23 · Answer 4

Vala

Top Pro

Rich GTK Support

Vala developed by Gnome Foundation. See More

Top Con

Very few resources allocated to the language

Only a single person is working on Vala full time. Gnome Foundation isn't allocating sufficient resources to properly maintain Vala. 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

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

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 Con

Very limited adoption

Vala isn't used in areas other than GTK development, and no major business has adopted the language. 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 a general purpose language

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

Top Pro

Good documentation

There is Valadoc and most of the libraries have Devhelp packages. See More

Top Con

Very limited tooling

Though using Gnome Builder, you can debug it easily. 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 Con

Heavy reliance on GObject

Heavy reliance on GObject types, although Vala can be used without GObject. (posix profile) See More

Top Pro

Stable ABI

You can write a library with ABI stability. See More

Top Con

Not well documented

It already has tons of documentation, even a book about Vala.https://leanpub.com/vala https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala/Documentation See More

Top Pro

A general purpose language

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

Top Con

No stable version

No stable version of Vala released for over a decade so far. Means that Vala isn't production ready. See More

See All

score 21 · Answer 5

Rust

Top Pro

Built-in concurrency

Rust has built-in support for concurrency. See More

Top Con

Juvenile ecosystem

Libraries for writing applications are still unstable. See More

Specs

Platforms:Linux, MacOS X, Windows, BSD

Current stable version:1.71.1

License:MIT/Apache

Top Pro

Catch errors at compile-time

Since Rust is statically typed, you can catch multiple errors during compile time. This is extremely helpful with debugging, especially compared with dynamically typed languages that may fail silently during runtime. See More

Top Con

Terrible for a desktop GUI application

Frameworks / Toolkits are developed by small teams and are not mature. 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

Very new and untested

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

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

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

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. It's 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 Pro

Cross platform

Compiling for another platform is simple via Cargo. See More

Top Pro

Zero-cost futures or Async IO

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

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

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

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

See All

score 16 · Answer 6

C

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

Requires memory management

Learning programming is already hard enough when you don't have to worry about memory leaks. See More

ThriftyAmaterasu's Experience

Easy language to learn. Many gui toolkits to choose from that can produce quality products. See More

Specs

Current stable version:C'18

Typing discipline:static

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

Paradigm:imperative

See All Specs

Top Pro

More control over the code

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

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

The need for C developers in the current market is very low, and trending downward

Older languages, like C, are no longer in their hay day. Even if you do learn it as your first language, you are only setting yourself up to need to learn another language in the long run. If you want a skill that you can not only learn from, but also potentially build a career on, C should not be your first choice. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 its syntax and by extensions with the syntax of many popular languages. 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 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

See All

score 19 · Answer 7

Golang

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 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

CoherentAristaeus's Experience

Easy to write and maintain. #Go has built-in concurrency. ❤ See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac etc.

Current stable version:1.21.0

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

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

Those who are used to Visual Studio can feel the lack of a forms designer for rapid development. 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

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

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 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

The go compiler compiles binaries instantly — as fast as a scripting language interpreter

Compiled binaries are fast — about as fast in C in most cases. Compiles on every OS without effort — truly cross-platform compiler. As a result of the fast compilation speed, you can use the gorun program to use go source code as if it was a scripting language. See More

Top 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

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

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

API documentation is rich in content; easy to memorize

Only features deemed critical are added to the language to prevent cruft from working its way into the language. The language is small enough to fit inside one's head without having to repeatedly open documentation. Documentation is hosted on an official webpage in a manner that is simple to read and understand. See More

Top 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

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 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

Exceptionally simple and scalable multithreaded and concurrent programming

Goroutines are "lightweight threads" that runs on OS threads. They provide a simple way for concurrent operations — prepending a function with go will execute it concurrently. It utilizes channels for communication between goroutines which aids to prevent races and makes synchronizing execution effortless across goroutines. The maximum number of OS threads goroutines can run on may be defined at compile time with the GOMAXPROCS variable. See More

Top Con

No real support for desktop graphics

Perhaps the new HTML5 support may fix that soon. See More

Top Con

RAM hog

A less organised RAM garbage disposal & swap system than languages like HaXe or C#. See More

Top Con

Does not support circular dependencies

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 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

Top Con

Requires specific directory structure and environment variable settings

Too much knowledge required for a first programming language. See More

Top Con

Expects prior familiarity with tooling, "advanced" OS use

A standard step of even installing Go is modifying your path -- a person who's encountering their first language might not even understand. It's hard to escape using Go without familiarity with using build tools, managing and organizing project directories, etc. It's not as simple as Python's "just run the .py file with the interpreter." 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 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

See All

score 6 · Answer 8

Free Pascal

Top Pro

Cross platform

Many target platforms and architectures. See More

RickZeeland's Experience

Can be used with the free Lazarus IDE to design forms for cross-platform applications. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Top Pro

Fast compiler

Very fast, even big programs compile very quickly. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Top Pro

Easy and fast interface

Top Pro

Powerful

Close to metal while being high level, performance to match C/C++ See More

See All

score 8 · Answer 9

OCaml

Top Pro

Compiler creates very fast code

The compiler result competes with C and C++. See More

Specs

Current stable version:4.0.7

License:LGPL version 2.1

Price:Open source (Free)

Site:http://ocaml.org

See All Specs

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

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

A practical approach to functional programming

E.g. Data elements are immutable by default but can be explicitly set to mutable if required. For .. loops are available. See More

Top Pro

Multi-paradigm language

Ocaml is a very strong functional programming language but also supports some object oriented programming techniques. See More

Top Pro

Strong editor integration

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

Top Pro

Encourages functional style

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

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

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

See All

score 2 · Answer 10

Pharo

Top Pro

Portable across the main OSs

Specs

Platforms:MacOSX; Linux; Windows

License:MIT

Typing discipline:Dynamically typed

Paradigm:Object-oriented

See All Specs

Top Pro

Highly ergonomic

Applications written in Pharo are both enjoyable to use and to write. The introspective tools of the IDE are a great example. See More

Top Pro

Easily learnt

There is good, free documentation including several books written by experts with extensive examples. There is an online MOOC. There are many tutorial videos. Supportive conferences and community. Even a professional support option if desired. See More

Top Pro

Beautiful coding patterns in your IDE

No need to search google for compact beautiful examples of how to do things, your live environment source is available and you can easily live search, see how it works and copy how the masters would do it (examples most languages still copy too). See More

See All

score 3 · Answer 11

Lobster

Top Pro

WebAssembly backend

More options for users. See More

Top Con

Small community

Lead doesn't appear to be so ambitious or has a vision to push making more popular. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS

Current stable version:v2023

License:Apache v2

Developer:Wouter van Oortmerssen

See All Specs

Top Pro

Type inference algorithm

Just works. Goes further than most languages in terms of allowing code without types. See More

Top Con

Python-like syntax, but different use case and domain

Not Python compatible and often significantly different in purpose and use cases. See More

Top Pro

Inline structs

Structs are allocated in their parent, and come at zero overhead. See More

Top Pro

Compile time reference counting

Unlike Rust doesn't make the programmer jump through hoops, mainly automatic. Does an analysis similar to the Rust borrow checker to infer lifetimes, but makes life easier on the programmer. See More

Top Pro

Automatic memory management

Better than Rust. No sadism. See More

Top Pro

Python-esque syntax

There's an audience who loves that. See More

See All

score 2 · Answer 12

FreeBasic

All

1

Specs

Platforms:Windows, DOS, Linux

Current stable version:1.05

GZipped size:11.3 Mb

score 6 · Answer 13

C++

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

Specs

Standard: ISO/IEC 14882 or C++17

Engine:UE4 , Cocos-2d-x

Top Pro

Powerful memory management

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

Teaches fundamental OOP

Teaches you to leverage object oriented programming. 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 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 Pro

Best way to understand algorithms

Top Pro

C code can be used in C++ code

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

See All

score 3 · Answer 14

Nim

Top Con

Concurrency hard to use

Difficult to use, too verbose. See More

Specs

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

Current stable version:2.0.0

License:MIT

GZipped size:14,2 MB

See All Specs

Top Con

Atrocious error messages

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

Top Con

Lacks void / null safety

Easy to get involved in safety issues. See More

Top Con

Memory management disasters

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

See All

score 3 · Answer 15

JavaFX

Top Con

Does not automatically give you a pure platform look and feel

Cannot be used with non-JVM languages. See More

Top Pro

FX uses hardware acceleration and Java is fast, so good for 2D action games

Also has many built-in effects, like scale, rotate, color shifting, etc. The look and feel is simple to change later, as it uses Cascaded Style Sheets. See More

ReverentGrannus's Experience

I have written about 20 desktop applications in Java. Mostly using JavaFX, but some in the older Swing library. See More

See All

score 2 · Answer 16

Any JVM language + Eclipse Rich Client Platform

Top Pro

Cross platform

Top Con

It is worth only for serious B2B applications and rich professional tools, not for consumer applications

It is because JVM is very huge prerequisite to have on consumer's machine. Also JVM uses more memory, than native technologies. Also Rich Client Platform applications looks specific, that is OK for Business applications, but weird for consumer products. I would recommend EclipseRCP as an alternative to modern web SPA (Single Page Application) approach in B2B sector. See More

DecorousWerethekau's Experience

Fast, smooth. I've used FX in a bunch of projects. The UIs that result are beautiful. See More

Top Pro

Has a rich library of UI components SWT + JFace

Top Pro

You can use any JVM language

Java, Clojure, JRuby, Groovy, Kotlin are some options. See More

Top Pro

There is a technology to deploy updates with update site

Top Pro

Beautiful UIs

Top Pro

You can embed a lot of Eclipse technologies to your application, such as BIRT for reports for example.

Top Pro

Uses native UI elements

See All

score 15 · Answer 17

Javascript / GitHub Electron

Top Pro

Works on Linux, Windows, Mac

Being powered by Javascript, apps build with Electron can be packed to run on all 3 platforms. See More

Top Con

Low performance

Electron applications use significantly more CPU, RAM, and disk space than applications written in almost any other framework. This results in poor battery life as well as an unpleasant user experience. See More

Top Pro

Wide spread support

Javascript is a very easy language to learn, and is handy for all manner of other things. There's a good chance you already know it, or that you will need to know it in the future. See More

Top Con

Backwards incompatibility between versions

Electron is growing and constantly changing, but there is no care whatsoever whether the changes in a new version will break your application or not. Even if you write and maintain one app, changes to how Electron handles JS files and functions will make maintenance of a single app your full time job. Even the development process, programming mindset and tooling changes between versions, so there is no guarantee that your app will even have a proper architecture a year from when you've built it. See More

Top Pro

WebApps without additional work

If you don't require native features and could write a web app (i.e. a website with dynamic elements), then you could just extend it and turn it into a native app. This means that people just need to type your URL to use you app and may get more by downloading and installing it. See More

See All

score 5 · Answer 18

PyGObject / Python3

Top Con

Doesn't work well if you're targetting Windows, even though there probably is a binding

Not very close to Windows look and feel. See More

Top Pro

Works particularly well on Linux, as many desktops use Python and GObject

GObject is a 'C' library with bindings to many other languages, so can be widely used. Nice GTK.UIManager function to produce a menu system from a string. See More

ReverentGrannus's Experience

Used for a couple of test projects. Works well, but GObject library is not very beginner friendly. See More

Specs

License:LGPLv2.1+

See All

score 1 · Answer 19

Perl

Top Pro

Tons of modules (CPAN)

Top Con

Some programmers use bad style when writing modules

Many examples and modules are intended to obfuscate or impress with the succinct nature of Perl over the ease of readability. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Top Pro

Large community (forums, irc)

Top Pro

Native and powerful regex engine

Top Pro

Powerful string matching abilities

Top Pro

Very fast excecution time

Usually 5 times faster than Python and 10 times than TCL. See More

See All

20 Options Considered

My Recommendation for Gambas

My Recommendation for Gambas

Complete IDE for GUI development

Not cross platform

Constantly updated

The documentation is not the best

Easy to get started for someone familiar with VB on Windows

May have trouble interfacing to C code structs

Complete application development suite

Difficult to satisfy runtime requirements

Fast to write apps

Git integration

Enhanced with a new test suite

Runs on Windows 10 WSL2 environment, reported successful compilation on MacOS

My Recommendation for Python

My Recommendation for Python

Easy to learn

The process of shipping/distributing software is relatively complicated

Can be used in many domains

Too opinionated for a general-purpose programming language

GTK support through PyGObject

Speed can matter

Widely available

Limited support for functional programming

Cross-platform

Arch Linux Python system applications breaks when you upgrade python

Good documentation

Packaging can be a nightmare

Lots of tutorials

Painful to manage system dependencies

Clear syntax

Bad for games

It's really simple

Significant whitespace

Best chances of earning most money

Not good for mobile development

Easy to get started

Inelegant and messy language design

Easy to learn, More to Go

Language fragmentation

Comes with extensive libraries

Relatively slow

Advanced community projects

Abstraction to the point of hinderance

Supports various programming paradigms

Unflexible userbase

Good introduction to datatypes

It is best suited for scripting, but so are many other languages.

Active and helpful community

Version Confusion with V2.x and V3.x

Easy to find jobs

Does not teach you about data types

Has many libraries for scientific computing, data mining and machine learning

Worst language design ever

Has features of both high and low level language

Might not be very future-proof

Hard to debug other people's code

Slow to run

Multi-threading can introduce unwanted complexity

My Recommendation for Qt / C++

My Recommendation for Qt / C++

Good documentation

Not free/expensive

Portable

Global community

QML

LGPL license

Open Source

My Recommendation for Vala

My Recommendation for Vala

Rich GTK Support

Very few resources allocated to the language

Fast

A very naïve approach to the real problem

Easy Syntax

Very limited adoption

C compatible API (and ABI)

Not a general purpose language

Good documentation