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  5. Akka vs Rust

Akka vs Rust

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Rust
Rust
Stacks6.1K
Followers5.0K
Votes1.2K
GitHub Stars107.6K
Forks13.9K
Akka
Akka
Stacks1.2K
Followers1.0K
Votes88

Akka vs Rust: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown code provides a comparison between Akka and Rust and highlights the key differences between the two.

  1. Concurrency Model: Akka is built on the Actor Model, which resembles a distributed system of asynchronous and independent actors. It focuses on message passing and location transparency. On the other hand, Rust adopts a "fearless concurrency" approach, emphasizing thread safety through ownership, borrowing, and lifetime concepts.

  2. Memory Management: Akka relies on a garbage collector for memory management. It allows developers to focus on business logic without worrying much about memory management. In contrast, Rust ensures memory safety at compile-time through strict ownership and borrowing rules, eliminating the need for garbage collection.

  3. Programming Paradigm: Akka is developed in Scala, a multi-paradigm language that supports both object-oriented and functional programming. This enables developers to leverage the benefits of both paradigms. Rust, on the other hand, adheres to a systems programming paradigm, focusing on performance, control over resources, and memory safety.

  4. Language Ecosystem: Akka, being built on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), benefits from the vast ecosystem of Java libraries and frameworks. It also provides interoperability with Java code. Rust has a growing ecosystem with a focus on systems programming. It offers well-documented libraries for low-level tasks and is gaining popularity in areas like web backend development.

  5. Concurrency Primitives: Akka provides built-in abstractions like actors, which simplify concurrent programming. These actors encapsulate state and communicate through message passing, providing a high level of concurrency control. Rust, on the other hand, offers low-level concurrency primitives like threads, channels, and mutexes, allowing fine-grained control over concurrency.

  6. Error Handling: Akka follows the "let it crash" philosophy, where failures are considered a normal part of a distributed system. It provides supervisors to handle failures and restart actors. Rust takes a different approach with its "fail fast" philosophy. It encourages explicit error handling through its Result and Option types, ensuring that errors are handled early and explicitly, preventing unexpected application behavior.

In summary, Akka focuses on actor-based concurrency, leveraging the JVM ecosystem, and allowing developers to focus on business logic. Rust, on the other hand, prioritizes memory safety, control over concurrency, and performance in systems programming, with a growing ecosystem for low-level tasks.

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Advice on Rust, Akka

Timm
Timm

VP Of Engineering at Flexperto GmbH

Nov 10, 2020

Decided

We have a lot of experience in JavaScript, writing our services in NodeJS allows developers to transition to the back end without any friction, without having to learn a new language. There is also the option to write services in TypeScript, which adds an expressive type layer. The semi-shared ecosystem between front and back end is nice as well, though specifically NodeJS libraries sometimes suffer in quality, compared to other major languages.

As for why we didn't pick the other languages, most of it comes down to "personal preference" and historically grown code bases, but let's do some post-hoc deduction:

Go is a practical choice, reasonably easy to learn, but until we find performance issues with our NodeJS stack, there is simply no reason to switch. The benefits of using NodeJS so far outweigh those of picking Go. This might change in the future.

PHP is a language we're still using in big parts of our system, and are still sometimes writing new code in. Modern PHP has fixed some of its issues, and probably has the fastest development cycle time, but it suffers around modelling complex asynchronous tasks, and (on a personal note) lack of support for writing in a functional style.

We don't use Python, Elixir or Ruby, mostly because of personal preference and for historic reasons.

Rust, though I personally love and use it in my projects, would require us to specifically hire for that, as the learning curve is quite steep. Its web ecosystem is OK by now (see https://www.arewewebyet.org/), but in my opinion, it is still no where near that of the other web languages. In other words, we are not willing to pay the price for playing this innovation card.

Haskell, as with Rust, I personally adore, but is simply too esoteric for us. There are problem domains where it shines, ours is not one of them.

682k views682k
Comments
Abdul
Abdul

Jun 22, 2020

Needs adviceonJavaScriptJavaScriptPythonPythonRustRust

So, I've been working with all 3 languages JavaScript, Python and Rust, I know that all of these languages are important in their own domain but, I haven't took any of it to the point where i could say I'm a pro at any of these languages. I learned JS and Python out of my own excitement, I learned rust for some IoT based projects. just confused which one i should invest my time in first... that does have Job and freelance potential in market as well...

I am an undergraduate in computer science. (3rd Year)

655k views655k
Comments
Roman
Roman

Machine Learning, Software Engineering and Life

Feb 23, 2020

Decided

I chose Golang as a language to write Tango because it's super easy to get started with. I also considered Rust, but learning curve of it is much higher than in Golang. I felt like I would need to spend an endless amount of time to even get the hello world app working in Rust. While easy to learn, Golang still shows good performance, multithreading out of the box and fun to implement.

I also could choose PHP and create a phar-based tool, but I was not sure that it would be a good choice as I want to scale to be able to process Gbs of access log data

394k views394k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Rust
Rust
Akka
Akka

Rust is a systems programming language that combines strong compile-time correctness guarantees with fast performance. It improves upon the ideas of other systems languages like C++ by providing guaranteed memory safety (no crashes, no data races) and complete control over the lifecycle of memory.

Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
107.6K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
13.9K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
6.1K
Stacks
1.2K
Followers
5.0K
Followers
1.0K
Votes
1.2K
Votes
88
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 146
    Guaranteed memory safety
  • 133
    Fast
  • 89
    Open source
  • 75
    Minimal runtime
  • 73
    Pattern matching
Cons
  • 28
    Hard to learn
  • 24
    Ownership learning curve
  • 12
    Unfriendly, verbose syntax
  • 4
    No jobs
  • 4
    Many type operations make it difficult to follow
Pros
  • 32
    Great concurrency model
  • 17
    Fast
  • 12
    Actor Library
  • 10
    Open source
  • 7
    Resilient
Cons
  • 3
    Mixing futures with Akka tell is difficult
  • 2
    No type safety
  • 2
    Closing of futures
  • 1
    Very difficult to refactor
  • 1
    Typed actors still not stable

What are some alternatives to Rust, Akka?

JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

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