When comparing CFML vs DASH, the Slant community recommends DASH for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” DASH is ranked 52nd while CFML is ranked 73rd. The most important reason people chose DASH is:
Dash has a very fast startup, this happens because the shell is started a lot of times during boot and dash minimizes the work it does during this process.
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Pros
Pro Rapid application development
Get a web app up and running fast with stuff built right in to CFML! Frameworks make it even faster but lengthen the learning curve.
Pro Easily query a database
Newcomers can use an html-like syntax to query a database. Advanced developers can use a scripted syntax to execute stored procedures.
Pro Multiple engine implementations available
There are multiple engine implementations available including Adobe ColdFusion, Lucee, New Atlanta BlueDragon, Railo, and Open BlueDragon among others.
Pro Quick document and image manupulation
ColdFusion can quickly interact with PDFs , Spreadsheets to read/manipulate the data. There are a lot of built in functions to manipulate images quickly.
Pro Fast startup
Dash has a very fast startup, this happens because the shell is started a lot of times during boot and dash minimizes the work it does during this process.
Pro Low memory usage, which matters a lot in embedded
It is designed to be very lightweight and has no support for shell specific extensions that are not POSIX.
Pro Default shell on Debian systems
DASH is the default shell for Debian based systems due to it speed, full POSIX compliance and low overhead.
Pro Full POSIX support
It's fully POSIX compatible, so if your script runs on dash it will probably run on all other shells.
Pro A perfect clone
It's a clone of the original System V4 Bourne shell.
Cons
Con Little actual use either in academia or professionally
Con Doesn't support all bash features
Dash does not support all bash features, sometimes called 'bashisms' unless explicitly pointed at /bin/sh
.