Go vs Scala vs Swift

Overview

Golang

Stacks24.0K

Followers13.9K

Votes3.3K

GitHub Stars130.7K

Forks18.4K

Swift

Stacks21.9K

Followers13.6K

Votes1.3K

Scala

Stacks11.9K

Followers7.8K

Votes1.5K

GitHub Stars14.4K

Forks3.1K

Go vs Scala vs Swift: What are the differences?

Concurrency Model: Go is known for its built-in support for concurrency through goroutines and channels, making it easier for developers to write efficient concurrent programs. Scala, on the other hand, relies on libraries such as Akka for handling concurrency. Swift also supports concurrency with features like Grand Central Dispatch and async/await, but Go's goroutines provide a simpler and more intuitive way to handle concurrent programming.
Type System: Scala has a sophisticated type system with support for advanced features like higher-kinded types and implicit conversions. Swift, while also having a strong type system, is more streamlined and user-friendly, making it easier for developers to write type-safe code. In comparison, Go has a simpler type system with support for interfaces, structs, and pointers, providing a good balance between flexibility and simplicity.
Error Handling: Swift introduces the concept of optionals and try-catch mechanisms for handling errors, making it easier for developers to write robust and error-free code. Go follows a unique approach by using multiple return values to indicate errors, eliminating the need for exceptions. Scala combines both approaches with the use of Try and Option types for handling errors in a functional programming style.
Tooling and IDE Support: Swift has excellent IDE support with Xcode, providing features like code completion, refactoring, and debugging tools. Scala has strong integration with popular IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA, offering similar features for developers. Go, while lacking in IDE support, has a powerful command-line toolchain that helps in building, testing, and managing packages efficiently.
Community and Ecosystem: Go has a large and active community with a focus on simplicity and performance, leading to the development of a rich ecosystem of libraries and tools. Scala's community is more inclined towards functional programming paradigms, resulting in a diverse set of libraries for building scalable and maintainable applications. Swift's community, backed by Apple, provides extensive resources for iOS and macOS development, along with a growing ecosystem of open-source libraries and frameworks.
Performance: Go is renowned for its high performance due to its efficient runtime and garbage collector, making it suitable for building high-performance systems. Scala, being a JVM-based language, benefits from the optimizations provided by the JVM, resulting in good performance for most applications. Swift, being a compiled language with a focus on optimization, offers competitive performance compared to other languages like Objective-C.

In Summary, Go, Scala, and Swift differ in their concurrency models, type systems, error handling approaches, tooling support, community ecosystems, and performance characteristics.

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Advice on Golang, Swift, Scala

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

Golang	Swift	Scala
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.	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.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 130.7K	GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 14.4K
GitHub Forks 18.4K	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 3.1K
Stacks 24.0K	Stacks 21.9K	Stacks 11.9K
Followers 13.9K	Followers 13.6K	Followers 7.8K
Votes 3.3K	Votes 1.3K	Votes 1.5K
Pros & Cons
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 259 Ios 180 Elegant 126 Not Objective-C 107 Backed by apple 93 Type inference Cons 6 Must own a mac 2 Memory leaks are not uncommon 1 Complicated process for exporting modules 1 Very irritatingly picky about things that’s 1 Its classes compile to roughly 300 lines of assembly	Pros 188 Static typing 178 Pattern-matching 175 Jvm 172 Scala is fun 138 Types Cons 11 Slow compilation time 7 Multiple ropes and styles to hang your self 6 Too few developers available 4 Complicated subtyping 2 My coworkers using scala are racist against other stuff
Integrations
Revel Martini	Cocoa Touch (iOS)	Java

What are some alternatives to Golang, Swift, Scala?

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.

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.

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.

Clojure

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.

Related Comparisons

Go vs Scala vs Swift: What are the differences?

Concurrency Model: Go is known for its built-in support for concurrency through goroutines and channels, making it easier for developers to write efficient concurrent programs. Scala, on the other hand, relies on libraries such as Akka for handling concurrency. Swift also supports concurrency with features like Grand Central Dispatch and async/await, but Go's goroutines provide a simpler and more intuitive way to handle concurrent programming.
Type System: Scala has a sophisticated type system with support for advanced features like higher-kinded types and implicit conversions. Swift, while also having a strong type system, is more streamlined and user-friendly, making it easier for developers to write type-safe code. In comparison, Go has a simpler type system with support for interfaces, structs, and pointers, providing a good balance between flexibility and simplicity.
Error Handling: Swift introduces the concept of optionals and try-catch mechanisms for handling errors, making it easier for developers to write robust and error-free code. Go follows a unique approach by using multiple return values to indicate errors, eliminating the need for exceptions. Scala combines both approaches with the use of Try and Option types for handling errors in a functional programming style.
Tooling and IDE Support: Swift has excellent IDE support with Xcode, providing features like code completion, refactoring, and debugging tools. Scala has strong integration with popular IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA, offering similar features for developers. Go, while lacking in IDE support, has a powerful command-line toolchain that helps in building, testing, and managing packages efficiently.
Community and Ecosystem: Go has a large and active community with a focus on simplicity and performance, leading to the development of a rich ecosystem of libraries and tools. Scala's community is more inclined towards functional programming paradigms, resulting in a diverse set of libraries for building scalable and maintainable applications. Swift's community, backed by Apple, provides extensive resources for iOS and macOS development, along with a growing ecosystem of open-source libraries and frameworks.
Performance: Go is renowned for its high performance due to its efficient runtime and garbage collector, making it suitable for building high-performance systems. Scala, being a JVM-based language, benefits from the optimizations provided by the JVM, resulting in good performance for most applications. Swift, being a compiled language with a focus on optimization, offers competitive performance compared to other languages like Objective-C.

In Summary, Go, Scala, and Swift differ in their concurrency models, type systems, error handling approaches, tooling support, community ecosystems, and performance characteristics.

Go vs Scala vs Swift

Overview