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Add to SafariLiveScript vs ATS
When comparing LiveScript vs ATS, the Slant community recommends ATS for most people. In the question“What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?” ATS is ranked 49th while LiveScript is ranked 67th. The most important reason people chose ATS is:
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.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Designed for High-level functional code
LiveScript has terse syntax for common functional operations like map, and ships with a library, prelude.ls, with many of the functions most commonly used by functional programmers.
Pro Good amount of programmer flexibility
There's a huge range of features that can make common tasks faster.
Pro ECMA 6 Features
It is the declared goal of LiveScript’s creators to track ECMAScript 6. Hence, the language gives you ECMAScript 6 plus type annotations (which are optional).
LiveScript's module syntax is currently a bit behind the ECMAScript 6 specification (something that will be fixed eventually). It supports two module standards: CJS (Node.js) and AMD (RequireJS).
Pro Fixes coffeescript scoping issues
= is used to declare variables in the current scope, in order to redeclare variables of outer scope := is used. This way bugs are reduced.
Pro Supported by WebStorm and Visual Studio
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.
Pro Free and open-source compiler
The compiler (ATS/Postiats) is GPLv3.
Pro Functional programming
The syntax is ML-like with the usual functional language features like pattern matching and tail-call optimization.
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++.
Pro Good module system
Similar to Modula-3. This makes ATS a viable choice even for large-scale projects.
Pro Safe concurrency
ATS can prove its concurrent programs have no deadlocks or race conditions.
Cons
Con Strong functional lean
LiveScript is designed to be a high level functional language. For people who prefer a more imperative approach it can be hard to get used to.
Con Compiles to unreadable javascript
JSON.stringify(
each(upCaseName)(
sortBy(function(it){
return it.id;
})(
(function(){
var i$, ref$, len$, ref1$, j$, len1$, ref2$, results$ = [];
for (i$ = 0, len$ = (ref$ = table1).length; i$ < len$; ++i$) {
ref1$ = ref$[i$], id1 = ref1$.id, name = ref1$.name;
for (j$ = 0, len1$ = (ref1$ = table2).length; j$ < len1$; ++j$) {
ref2$ = ref1$[j$], id2 = ref2$.id, age = ref2$.age;
if (id1 === id2) {
results$.push({
id: id1,
name: name,
age: age
});
}
}
}
return results$;
}()))));Con No Windows version
But it does run on Cygwin.
