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Add to SafariWhen comparing Amber vs Idris, the Slant community recommends Amber for most people. In the question“What are the best languages that compile to JavaScript? ” Amber is ranked 11th while Idris is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Amber is:
Amber includes an integrated development environment with a class browser, workspace, transcript, object inspector and debugger.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Includes an IDE
Amber includes an integrated development environment with a class browser, workspace, transcript, object inspector and debugger.
Pro Smalltalk is a simple, elegant, and powerful language
Pro One-to-one JS equivalent
Amber is written in itself, including the parser and compiler, and compiles into efficient JavaScript, mapping one-to-one with the JS equivalent.
Pro Full dependent types
Idris not only has support for type classes, but is a fully dependently typed language, giving you the full power to statically verify your code.
Pro Domain driven design and type driven development
Because of full dependent types in Idris, the programmer can focus more on modelling the domain with types and waste less time fixing common bugs that the type checker will catch. Dependent types help apply type driven development and a lot of code auto generation, making the compiler and type checker an ally in developing working software instead of just getting in the way.
Cons
Con Very few learning resources
There are very little learning resources for Amber outside the official documentation. Which may not be enough for beginners, especially people that don't have much experience in programming.
Con Not widely used
Con Not widely used
Con Weaker type inference
As type inference is undecidable for dependently-typed languages, Idris cannot offer the full type inference that Haskell supports, and so more type annotations will be needed.
Con Different semantics from Haskell
Idris, while similar to Haskell, has strict semantics, which may cause some confusion if your backend is done in Haskell. If using Idris, it would make sense to do the backend in Idris as well, if not for the fact that Idris currently has fewer libraries available for web development than Haskell.
