Language shootout

Evaluation of programming languages:

• C
• C#
• C++
• D
• Go
• Java
• Nim
• Odin
• Rust
• Zig

Mostly interested in non garbage collected languages in this shootout.

Challenges

Implementations for the challenges are likely not idomatic due to my lack of experience in the language. Most of my programming experience is in Java and PHP.

Hello

Hello World to test startup and minimum memory costs.

Lexer

Implements a lexer for a simple scripting language. The syntax requires only a single character of lookahead.

Palindrome

Use parallelism to calculate the sum of all numbers with 9 digits that are a palindrome.

Vector

Vector (ie. dynamic resizable array) test.

Binary Trees

Adaptation of binary-trees from the The Computer Language Benchmark Games. Tests memory management. Implementations are single threaded and use ready available libraries.

Mandelbrot

Plot the Mandelbrot set [-1.5-i,0.5+i] on an 16000x16000 bitmap. Write output in portable bitmap format (pbm). From the The Computer Language Benchmark Games.

NBody

Model the orbits of Jovian planets, using the same simple symplectic-integrator. From the The Computer Language Benchmark Games.

fasta

Generate and write random DNA sequences. From the The Computer Language Benchmark Games.

knucleotide

Hashtable of k-nucleotide strings. From the The Computer Language Benchmark Games.

Notes

C

Pros:

• Portable assembly
• Foundational language
• Simple

Cons:

• Lots of footguns
• Manual memory management
• Weakly typed
• Barebones:
  • limited string operations. eg. doing string replacements
  • no dynamic array or hashtables
  • no built-in array slicing

C#

Pros:

• Improvements to Java such as:
  • Structs
  • Unsigned integer types

Cons:

• Garbage collector
• UTF-16 strings
• Requires runtime

C++

Pros:

• Multi-paradigm
• Industry standard (used heavily for game development)

Cons:

• Bloated language. No mere mortal can know all the language.
• Hidden control flow. Eg. copy/move constructors are called and its not obvious.

D

Pros:

• Improved C++

Cons:

• Small community
• Documentation lacks examples
• Garbage collection. GC is also not very advanced

Go

Pros:

• Simple
• Fast compile times
• Generates standalone executables

Cons:

• Garbage collection. Generates less garbage then language like Java
• Manual error propagation

Java

Pros:

• Decent standard library
• Lots of 3rd party libraries
• Exceptions for error handling

Cons:

• Garbage collector
• UTF-16 strings
• No unsigned integer types
• Primitive types require boxing
• Everything must be in a class, no free-standing functions
• Requires runtime
• There is a tendency in the community to over abstract

Nim

Odin

Pros:

• Being used commerically by JangaFX
• Good standard library. Eg. built-in matrix type
• Support for SOA

Cons:

• Lacks popularity
• Language server in early development
• No 1.0 release

Misc:

• No Uniform Function Call Syntax (ie. mytype.method())

Rust

Pros:

• Safety
• Nice compiler error messages
• Cargo

Cons:

• Slow compile times

Zig

Pros:

• No hidden control flow
• No hidden memory allocations
• No preprocessor, no macros
• Error values
• Custom allocators. Eg. arena allocator

Cons:

• Missing documentation
• No 1.0 release
• Not ready for production use