Common Lisp vs Hack vs JavaScript

Overview

Hack

Stacks818

Followers169

Votes29

GitHub Stars18.5K

Forks3.1K

JavaScript

Stacks392.9K

Followers284.1K

Votes8.1K

Common Lisp

Stacks270

Followers255

Votes145

Common Lisp vs Hack vs JavaScript: What are the differences?

Type System: Common Lisp is a dynamic and weakly typed language, allowing for flexible programming but potentially leading to runtime errors. Hack, on the other hand, is a statically typed language, catching errors at compile time and enforcing stricter type rules. JavaScript falls in between, being a dynamically typed language that can mix type checking at runtime.
Concurrency Model: Common Lisp provides powerful multi-threading support with processes and threads, enabling concurrent programming. Hack also supports concurrency through asynchronous programming with async and await keywords. JavaScript, known for its single-threaded nature, utilizes event-driven programming along with callbacks and promises for handling parallel tasks.
Functional Programming Support: Common Lisp has strong support for functional programming paradigms, including first-class functions, higher-order functions, and lexical closures. Hack also supports functional programming features like lambdas and closures, making it a multi-paradigm language. JavaScript, with its functional programming roots, emphasizes functions as first-class citizens and supports higher-order functions and closures as well.
Tooling and Ecosystem: Common Lisp has a mature ecosystem with various libraries and development tools like SLIME for Emacs and Quicklisp for package management. Hack, developed by Facebook, provides a rich set of tools including the Hack type checker and HHVM virtual machine. JavaScript has a vast and vibrant ecosystem with popular frameworks like React, Angular, and Node.js, along with powerful tools like npm and webpack.
Error Handling: In Common Lisp, errors are typically handled using the special form handler-case to catch and recover from exceptions. Hack includes a robust type system that helps catch errors at compile time, reducing the likelihood of runtime exceptions. JavaScript relies on traditional try-catch blocks for handling exceptions and error propagation, offering flexibility but requiring careful error handling practices.
Performance: Common Lisp is known for its fast performance due to compiler optimizations and direct access to machine-level operations. Hack, being statically typed, can provide better performance optimization compared to dynamically typed languages like JavaScript. JavaScript, as an interpreted language, may experience performance overheads due to its dynamic nature, but optimizations in modern engines like V8 have significantly improved its performance.

In Summary, the key differences between Common Lisp, Hack, and JavaScript lie in their type systems, concurrency models, functional programming support, tooling and ecosystem, error handling mechanisms, and performance characteristics. Each language offers unique advantages and trade-offs, catering to different programming paradigms and use cases.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Hack	JavaScript	Common Lisp
Hack provides instantaneous type checking via a local server that watches the filesystem. It typically runs in less than 200 milliseconds, making it easy to integrate into your development workflow without introducing a noticeable delay.	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.	Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler. [source: wikipedia]
Fast Development; Type Checking; Built for HHVM; Type Annotations; Generics; Lambdas	-	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 18.5K	GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 3.1K	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 818	Stacks 392.9K	Stacks 270
Followers 169	Followers 284.1K	Followers 255
Votes 29	Votes 8.1K	Votes 145
Pros & Cons
Pros 6 Open source 6 Interoperates seamlessly with php 5 Backed by facebook 4 HHVM 2 Great documentation	Pros 1674 Can be used on frontend/backend 1498 It's everywhere 1164 Lots of great frameworks 900 Fast 747 Light weight Cons 25 A constant moving target, too much churn 20 Horribly inconsistent 17 Javascript is the New PHP 9 No ability to monitor memory utilitization 8 Shows Zero output in case of ANY error	Pros 24 Flexibility 22 High-performance 17 Comfortable: garbage collection, closures, macros, REPL 13 Stable 12 Lisp Cons 4 Too many Parentheses 3 Standard did not evolve since 1994 2 Small library ecosystem 2 No hygienic macros 1 Inadequate community infrastructure
Integrations
HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)	No integrations available	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Hack, JavaScript, Common Lisp?

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!

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 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.

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.

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.

Related Comparisons

Common Lisp vs Hack vs JavaScript: What are the differences?

Type System: Common Lisp is a dynamic and weakly typed language, allowing for flexible programming but potentially leading to runtime errors. Hack, on the other hand, is a statically typed language, catching errors at compile time and enforcing stricter type rules. JavaScript falls in between, being a dynamically typed language that can mix type checking at runtime.
Concurrency Model: Common Lisp provides powerful multi-threading support with processes and threads, enabling concurrent programming. Hack also supports concurrency through asynchronous programming with async and await keywords. JavaScript, known for its single-threaded nature, utilizes event-driven programming along with callbacks and promises for handling parallel tasks.
Functional Programming Support: Common Lisp has strong support for functional programming paradigms, including first-class functions, higher-order functions, and lexical closures. Hack also supports functional programming features like lambdas and closures, making it a multi-paradigm language. JavaScript, with its functional programming roots, emphasizes functions as first-class citizens and supports higher-order functions and closures as well.
Tooling and Ecosystem: Common Lisp has a mature ecosystem with various libraries and development tools like SLIME for Emacs and Quicklisp for package management. Hack, developed by Facebook, provides a rich set of tools including the Hack type checker and HHVM virtual machine. JavaScript has a vast and vibrant ecosystem with popular frameworks like React, Angular, and Node.js, along with powerful tools like npm and webpack.
Error Handling: In Common Lisp, errors are typically handled using the special form handler-case to catch and recover from exceptions. Hack includes a robust type system that helps catch errors at compile time, reducing the likelihood of runtime exceptions. JavaScript relies on traditional try-catch blocks for handling exceptions and error propagation, offering flexibility but requiring careful error handling practices.
Performance: Common Lisp is known for its fast performance due to compiler optimizations and direct access to machine-level operations. Hack, being statically typed, can provide better performance optimization compared to dynamically typed languages like JavaScript. JavaScript, as an interpreted language, may experience performance overheads due to its dynamic nature, but optimizations in modern engines like V8 have significantly improved its performance.

Common Lisp vs Hack vs JavaScript

Overview