When comparing Code New Roman vs Hack, the Slant community recommends Hack for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Hack is ranked 7th while Code New Roman is ranked 49th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Completely free
Code New Roman is published under SIL Open Font License making it completely free.
Pro Looks clean and beautiful
Code New Roman seems like a mix of Monaco and Consolas, but looks very well on retina monitors.
Pro Comfortable to read
It's comfortable for the user to read Code New Roman for long periods. OpenType features include hanging or lining numerals (slashed, dotted, and normal zeros) as well as alternative shapes for a number of lowercase letters.
Pro Available for Windows and OS X
You can download and install it on Windows vista or higher (for cleartype technology support) and Mac OSX.
Pro Different typefaces
Code New Roman offers Regular, Bold , Italic, and Bold-Italic typefaces.
Pro Looks great on Ubuntu 14.04
Code New Roman has been tested on cheap Dell Inspiron with Ubuntu 14.04 installed and looks great on gtk-based apps such as Sublime Text, Geany, and TextAdept. It's also great on Qt-based apps such as KDevelop and Spyder. For electron/nwjs-based applications, it looks great on Visual Studio Code and Brackets, but has yet been tested on atom. However, it looks horrible on Swing-based apps such as Netbeans or Jetbrains' IDE.
Pro Multilingual
Code New Roman is available in English.
Pro Highly anti-aliased
This means that jaggies are reduced, making the line smoother.
Pro Very readable
Pro Libre webfonts are available in svg, eot, ttf, woff, and woff2 formats
Hack is free for unlimited commercial and non-commercial use. The webfonts are hinted (TrueType instruction set) to optimize display on the screen and are built into all commonly used web font formats with each new release. They include the complete release character set and smaller (filesize) basic Latin subset releases. They are available in the build directory of the repository.
Pro Fixes many readability issues in Vera/DejaVu
The tilde symbol ('~'), comma (',') and semicolon (';') glyphs have been modified to be more readable at small sizes and/or on non-HD displays. In addition, the underscore symbol ('_') has been slightly lifted for alignment with surrounding characters.
Pro Avaliable in many GNU/Linux distro package manager
Including Debian/Ubuntu (fonts-hack), Fedora (font-hack-ttf), OpenSUSE (hack-fonts), Arch (ttf-hack) and probably many more. Much nicer than having to manually install/update
Pro Free/Open license
Pro Renders accurately on Windows on all font sizes
Pro Based on the tried and tested Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
The fonts are in the Vera Sans Mono lineage with a significant expansion of the character set (which includes Cyrillic and modern Greek character sets), new glyph shapes and modifications of the original glyph shapes, as well as improvements in metrics and hinting/TT instructions to make it more legible at small text sizes used for source code.
The changelog is available here.
Pro Powerline glyph patch is included
The regular set is patched with Powerline glyphs by default. There is no need to patch the font to use it in Powerline environments.
Pro Source code is released in UFO format
UFO source format is widely supported by all modern font editors if you would like to modify the typeface.
Cons
Con No updates
No updates or original publisher. Mostly edited and uploaded by many designers because of its OFL license.
Con Looks bad in Windows
Too much anti-aliased in Windows.
Con No ligatures in the default font
Although patched versions with ligatures do exist - see here.
Con Sometimes difficult to distinguish lowercase "i" (eye) and lowercase "l" (ell)
When using a higher resolution monitor and a smaller font size, the lowercase "i" (eye) and lowercase "l" (ell) are very difficult to distinguish. The space between the dot and the remainder of the letter seems to somehow disappear, thereby making it look like a solid line, similar to the lowercase "l" (ell).
Con Too similar to DejaVu
See this gif comparison between the two fonts.