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  5. C vs Common Lisp vs Rust

C vs Common Lisp vs Rust

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Rust
Rust
Stacks6.1K
Followers5.0K
Votes1.2K
GitHub Stars107.6K
Forks13.9K
C lang
C lang
Stacks14.9K
Followers4.2K
Votes253
Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Stacks268
Followers255
Votes145

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Advice on Rust, C lang, Common Lisp

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
Johan
Johan

Jan 28, 2021

Decided

Context: Writing an open source CLI tool.

Go and Rust over Python: Simple distribution.

With Go and Rust, just build statically compiled binaries and hand them out.

With Python, have people install with "pip install --user" and not finding the binaries :(.

Go and Rust over Python: Startup and runtime performance

Go and Rust over Python: No need to worry about which Python interpreter version is installed on the users' machines.

Go over Rust: Simplicity; Rust's memory management comes at a development / maintenance cost.

Go over Rust: Easier cross compiles from macOS to Linux.

397k views397k
Comments
Xiang
Xiang

Feb 23, 2021

Decided

Python has become the most popular language for machine learning right now since almost all machine learning tools provide service for this language, and it is really to use since it has many build-in objects like Hashtable. In C, you need to implement everything by yourself.

C++ is one of the most popular programming languages in graphics. It has many fancy libraries like eigen to help us process matrix. I have many previous projects about graphics based on C++ and this time, we also need to deal with graphics since we need to analyze movements of the human body. C++ has much more advantages than Java. C++ uses only compiler, whereas Java uses compiler and interpreter in both. C++ supports both operator overloading and method overloading whereas Java only supports method overloading. C++ supports manual object management with the help of new and delete keywords whereas Java has built-in automatic garbage collection.

381k views381k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Rust
Rust
C lang
C lang
Common Lisp
Common Lisp

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.

No description available.

Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler. [source: wikipedia]

Statistics
GitHub Stars
107.6K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
13.9K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
6.1K
Stacks
14.9K
Stacks
268
Followers
5.0K
Followers
4.2K
Followers
255
Votes
1.2K
Votes
253
Votes
145
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
    High size of builded executable
  • 4
    Many type operations make it difficult to follow
Pros
  • 69
    Performance
  • 49
    Low-level
  • 36
    Portability
  • 29
    Hardware level
  • 19
    Embedded apps
Cons
  • 5
    Low-level
  • 3
    No built in support for parallelism (e.g. map-reduce)
  • 3
    No built in support for concurrency
  • 3
    Lack of type safety
Pros
  • 24
    Flexibility
  • 22
    High-performance
  • 17
    Comfortable: garbage collection, closures, macros, REPL
  • 13
    Stable
  • 12
    Lisp
Cons
  • 4
    Too many Parentheses
  • 3
    Standard did not evolve since 1994
  • 2
    No hygienic macros
  • 2
    Small library ecosystem
  • 1
    Inadequate community infrastructure

What are some alternatives to Rust, C lang, Common Lisp?

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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