Clojure vs Elixir vs Go

Overview

Clojure

Stacks1.9K

Followers1.4K

Votes1.1K

GitHub Stars10.7K

Forks1.5K

Golang

Stacks24.0K

Followers13.9K

Votes3.3K

GitHub Stars130.7K

Forks18.4K

Elixir

Stacks3.5K

Followers3.3K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars26.0K

Forks3.5K

Clojure vs Elixir vs Go: What are the differences?

Introduction:
Clojure, Elixir, and Go are three popular programming languages known for their unique features and capabilities.

1. **Syntax**: Clojure is a Lisp dialect, Elixir is inspired by Ruby, while Go has a C-like syntax with static typing. Clojure uses prefix notation and emphasizes immutability, Elixir focuses on functional programming, and Go prioritizes simplicity and performance.
   
2. **Concurrency**: Elixir and Go are known for their robust support for concurrency. Elixir utilizes the actor model with lightweight processes and message passing, while Go utilizes goroutines and channels for managing concurrent tasks. Clojure also provides concurrency primitives but in a more functional programming style compared to Elixir and Go.

3. **Typing**: Clojure is dynamically typed, allowing for flexibility and quick prototyping. Elixir employs strong, dynamic typing with pattern matching for data manipulation. Go, on the other hand, is statically typed with explicit type declarations for better performance and reliability.

4. **Tooling and Ecosystem**: Elixir has a strong focus on developer tools and libraries, which enhances productivity. Go has built-in tooling for testing, profiling, and debugging, making it a popular choice for systems programming. Clojure's ecosystem is rich in libraries and frameworks, supporting a wide range of applications.

5. **Community and Adoption**: Elixir has a vibrant and growing community known for its helpfulness and inclusivity. Go has gained popularity for its simplicity and efficiency, especially in cloud-native applications. Clojure has a dedicated community with a focus on functional programming principles and language development.

6. **Performance**: Go is known for its blazing-fast performance, making it a top choice for building high-performance applications like servers and networking tools. Clojure and Elixir prioritize simplicity and developer productivity over raw performance, although they can be optimized for performance-critical tasks.

In Summary, Clojure emphasizes immutability and functional programming, Elixir focuses on concurrency and developer tools, while Go prioritizes performance and simplicity in its syntax and typing system.

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Advice on Clojure, Golang, Elixir

Ido

Mar 6, 2020

Decided

When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.

You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.

267k views267k

Comments

Ítalo

VP Platform Engineering at Lykon

Feb 19, 2020

Decided

We decided to use python to write our ETLs and import them into metabase via a lambda. Before python we tried using Go, but overall go was way more verbose than Python when writing the ETLs. Go also had some issues managing memory when using the S3 upload manager library. This was a deal breaker for us that made us switch to Python.

In the end the solution was much cleaner and maintainable.

261k views261k

Comments

Mohamed

Software Engineer at YottaHQ Inc.

Dec 2, 2019

Decided

PHP is easy to learn and you can get up and running in no time, available on almost all hosting providers and you can find developers easily. It has some great frameworks for building your backend like Symfony and Laravel. However, it can be challenging when running an enterprise and needs some adjustments, very recommended for starting a new project or startup.

208k views208k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Clojure	Golang	Elixir
Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.	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.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 10.7K	GitHub Stars 130.7K	GitHub Stars 26.0K
GitHub Forks 1.5K	GitHub Forks 18.4K	GitHub Forks 3.5K
Stacks 1.9K	Stacks 24.0K	Stacks 3.5K
Followers 1.4K	Followers 13.9K	Followers 3.3K
Votes 1.1K	Votes 3.3K	Votes 1.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros 118 It is a lisp 101 Concise syntax 100 Persistent data structures 90 jvm-based language 89 Concurrency Cons 11 Cryptic stacktraces 5 Need to wrap basically every java lib 4 Toxic community 3 Slow application startup 3 Tonns of abandonware	Pros 557 High-performance 398 Simple, minimal syntax 365 Fun to write 305 Easy concurrency support via goroutines 273 Fast compilation times Cons 43 You waste time in plumbing code catching errors 25 Verbose 23 Packages and their path dependencies are braindead 16 Google's documentations aren't beginer friendly 15 Dependency management when working on multiple projects	Pros 174 Concurrency 163 Functional 133 Erlang vm 113 Great documentation 105 Great tooling Cons 11 Fewer jobs for Elixir experts 7 Smaller userbase than other mainstream languages 5 Elixir's dot notation less readable ("object": 1st arg) 4 Dynamic typing 2 Difficult to understand
Integrations
Java	Revel Martini	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Clojure, Golang, Elixir?

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 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

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

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 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!

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# (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 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.

Swift

Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast. Swift is ready for your next iOS and OS X project — or for addition into your current app — because Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C.

Rust

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.

Related Comparisons

Clojure vs Elixir vs Go: What are the differences?

Introduction:
Clojure, Elixir, and Go are three popular programming languages known for their unique features and capabilities.

1. **Syntax**: Clojure is a Lisp dialect, Elixir is inspired by Ruby, while Go has a C-like syntax with static typing. Clojure uses prefix notation and emphasizes immutability, Elixir focuses on functional programming, and Go prioritizes simplicity and performance.
   
2. **Concurrency**: Elixir and Go are known for their robust support for concurrency. Elixir utilizes the actor model with lightweight processes and message passing, while Go utilizes goroutines and channels for managing concurrent tasks. Clojure also provides concurrency primitives but in a more functional programming style compared to Elixir and Go.

3. **Typing**: Clojure is dynamically typed, allowing for flexibility and quick prototyping. Elixir employs strong, dynamic typing with pattern matching for data manipulation. Go, on the other hand, is statically typed with explicit type declarations for better performance and reliability.

4. **Tooling and Ecosystem**: Elixir has a strong focus on developer tools and libraries, which enhances productivity. Go has built-in tooling for testing, profiling, and debugging, making it a popular choice for systems programming. Clojure's ecosystem is rich in libraries and frameworks, supporting a wide range of applications.

5. **Community and Adoption**: Elixir has a vibrant and growing community known for its helpfulness and inclusivity. Go has gained popularity for its simplicity and efficiency, especially in cloud-native applications. Clojure has a dedicated community with a focus on functional programming principles and language development.

6. **Performance**: Go is known for its blazing-fast performance, making it a top choice for building high-performance applications like servers and networking tools. Clojure and Elixir prioritize simplicity and developer productivity over raw performance, although they can be optimized for performance-critical tasks.

Clojure vs Elixir vs Go

Overview