StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Languages
  4. Languages
  5. Clojure vs Rust

Clojure vs Rust

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Clojure
Clojure
Stacks1.9K
Followers1.4K
Votes1.1K
GitHub Stars10.7K
Forks1.5K
Rust
Rust
Stacks6.1K
Followers5.0K
Votes1.2K
GitHub Stars107.6K
Forks13.9K

Clojure vs Rust: What are the differences?

Clojure and Rust are two popular programming languages with distinct features and characteristics. While Clojure is a dynamic and functional programming language that emphasizes simplicity and expressive power, Rust is a statically typed systems programming language known for its focus on performance, memory safety, and concurrency.

  1. Syntax and Paradigm: Clojure is a dialect of Lisp and follows a functional programming paradigm, where functions are treated as first-class citizens and immutability is encouraged. On the other hand, Rust follows an imperative programming paradigm with a syntax that resembles C++. It allows mutable variables and provides low-level control over memory and resources.

  2. Static vs Dynamic Typing: Clojure is dynamically typed, meaning variable types are checked at runtime. This allows for more flexibility and rapid prototyping but can sometimes lead to runtime errors. In contrast, Rust is statically typed, ensuring type safety at compile time. This helps catch errors early and optimize performance, but can require more upfront type annotations.

  3. Concurrency Models: Clojure provides built-in support for concurrency through its use of immutable data structures and software transactional memory (STM). These features allow for easy parallelism, synchronization, and safe shared access to mutable state. Rust, on the other hand, has strong support for low-level concurrency without sacrificing safety. It uses a unique ownership model and asynchronous programming constructs like channels and async/await to handle concurrency effectively.

  4. Memory Management: Clojure runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and relies on Java's garbage collector for automatic memory management. This allows developers to focus on writing code without worrying about memory allocation and deallocation. In contrast, Rust uses a combination of ownership system, borrowing, and lifetimes to provide deterministic memory management. It ensures memory safety without relying on garbage collection, making it suitable for systems programming.

  5. Error Handling: Clojure follows a more lenient approach to error handling, where exceptions are used for control flow. It provides try/catch blocks for catching exceptions, but they are typically reserved for exceptional conditions. Rust, on the other hand, embraces the concept of "zero-cost abstractions" and has an elaborate error handling mechanism. It uses the Result and Option types to handle errors explicitly, ensuring that errors are handled in a safe and predictable manner.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Clojure has a vibrant and supportive community that has developed a rich ecosystem of libraries and tools. It benefits from the extensive libraries and frameworks available in the Java ecosystem due to its interoperability with Java. Rust, being a younger language, has a rapidly growing community and ecosystem. It focuses on system-level programming and provides libraries for tasks like networking, parsing, and cryptography.

In summary, Clojure and Rust differ in their syntax, typing system, concurrency models, memory management, error handling, and community support. Clojure emphasizes simplicity, immutability, and functional programming, while Rust focuses on performance, memory safety, and concurrency for systems programming.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Clojure, Rust

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
Fronted
Fronted

Nov 23, 2020

Decided

We’re a new startup so we need to be able to deliver quick changes as we find our product market fit. We’ve also got to ensure that we’re moving money safely, and keeping perfect records. The technologies we’ve chosen mix mature but well maintained frameworks like Django, with modern web-first and api-first front ends like GraphQL, NextJS, and Chakra. We use a little Golang sparingly in our backend to ensure that when we interact with financial services, we do so with statically compiled, strongly typed, and strictly limited and reviewed code.

You can read all about it in our linked blog post.

720k views720k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Clojure
Clojure
Rust
Rust

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.

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.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
10.7K
GitHub Stars
107.6K
GitHub Forks
1.5K
GitHub Forks
13.9K
Stacks
1.9K
Stacks
6.1K
Followers
1.4K
Followers
5.0K
Votes
1.1K
Votes
1.2K
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
    Tonns of abandonware
  • 3
    Good code heavily relies on local conventions
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
    Many type operations make it difficult to follow
  • 4
    Variable shadowing
Integrations
Java
Java
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Clojure, Rust?

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.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase