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  1. Stackups
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  5. C vs Haskell

C vs Haskell

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Haskell
Haskell
Stacks1.4K
Followers1.2K
Votes527
C lang
C lang
Stacks14.9K
Followers4.2K
Votes253

C vs Haskell: What are the differences?

  1. Memory Management: In C, memory management is done manually by the programmer using functions like malloc and free, whereas in Haskell, memory management is automatically handled by the runtime system through garbage collection.

  2. Type System: C is a statically typed language, which means that types must be declared at compile time, while Haskell is a statically typed language with type inference, allowing types to be inferred by the compiler without explicit declarations in most cases.

  3. Imperative vs. Functional: C is an imperative language where programs are executed as a sequence of statements that change the state of the program, while Haskell is a functional language where computations are performed by evaluating expressions without changing state or using mutable data.

  4. Pattern Matching: Haskell supports pattern matching as a fundamental feature, making it easier to define functions by matching patterns of data, whereas in C, pattern matching is not directly supported, requiring manual iteration over data structures.

  5. Concurrency: Haskell has built-in support for lightweight threads and software transactional memory for handling concurrency, while in C, concurrency is typically achieved through libraries like pthreads or through platform-specific APIs.

  6. Error Handling: Error handling in Haskell is done through the use of monads like Maybe and Either to handle possible failures in a type-safe manner, whereas in C, error handling is traditionally done through error codes or exceptions.

In Summary, C and Haskell differ in memory management, type system, programming paradigms, pattern matching, concurrency support, and error handling mechanisms.

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Advice on Haskell, C lang

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
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
Satoshi
Satoshi

Mar 14, 2022

Needs adviceonC++C++C#C#.NET.NET

Actually, I'll add, C++ and C# as well.

Well, I'm into Computer Science since 1996, so I understand a bit of everything plus a lot of different OSs, I study 10 hours per day every day. However back in the 90s we didn't have books or universities about programming, all were passed through if you knew somebody in that profession. Which I did and in that time, he showed me .NET and MySQL, and that offered a lot of jobs also Java. Today you have a lot of options but I'm already discarding new languages as I believe they will jot succeed.

My always dream was to create game, and software. I don't understand all programming concepts and I'm studying all languages at the same time, so I'm heavy loaded. But that keeps me more aware.

I made a choice: use Python for everything but if you want performance, apps, security, compatibility, Multiplatform. What should I choose? The real question here is: which language should I go 100% and that language will teach me all I need about programming BUT without getting lost in that language forever (I discard any Assembly possibility) and one that has full documentation, support and libraries.

In my experience: I found a lot of info for python and java. But hardly I have ever found anything for C lang, C++ and, what about C# (it's only for Windows, is it easy, I saw a lot of documentation). Thanks!!

132k views132k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Haskell
Haskell
C lang
C lang

It is a general purpose language that can be used in any domain and use case, it is ideally suited for proprietary business logic and data analysis, fast prototyping and enhancing existing software environments with correct code, performance and scalability.

No description available.

Statically typed; Purely functional; Type inference; Concurrent
-
Statistics
Stacks
1.4K
Stacks
14.9K
Followers
1.2K
Followers
4.2K
Votes
527
Votes
253
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 90
    Purely-functional programming
  • 66
    Statically typed
  • 59
    Type-safe
  • 39
    Open source
  • 38
    Great community
Cons
  • 9
    Too much distraction in language extensions
  • 8
    Error messages can be very confusing
  • 5
    Libraries have poor documentation
  • 3
    No best practices
  • 3
    No good ABI
Pros
  • 69
    Performance
  • 49
    Low-level
  • 36
    Portability
  • 29
    Hardware level
  • 19
    Embedded apps
Cons
  • 5
    Low-level
  • 3
    No built in support for concurrency
  • 3
    Lack of type safety
  • 3
    No built in support for parallelism (e.g. map-reduce)

What are some alternatives to Haskell, C lang?

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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