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  5. Elm vs Racket

Elm vs Racket

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Elm
Elm
Stacks758
Followers744
Votes319
Racket
Racket
Stacks92
Followers83
Votes54

Elm vs Racket: What are the differences?

## Key Differences Between Elm and Racket

1. **Type System**: Elm uses a strong static type system that enforces immutability and helps prevent runtime errors, while Racket provides a dynamic typing system allowing for more flexibility but potentially leading to runtime errors if not handled properly.
2. **Functional Paradigm**: Elm focuses on functional programming with pure functions and immutable data structures, promoting a more declarative approach, whereas Racket supports multiple programming paradigms including functional, procedural, and object-oriented programming styles.
3. **Tooling and Ecosystem**: Elm has a simpler tooling ecosystem with built-in support for package management and a strong emphasis on simplicity and ease of use, while Racket has a rich set of libraries and tools for various domains including web development, language design, and scientific computing.
4. **Syntax and Expressiveness**: Elm has a clean and concise syntax influenced by Haskell making it easy to read and write, whereas Racket allows for more expressive syntax due to its macro system, enabling developers to create domain-specific languages and customize the language semantics.
5. **Concurrency Model**: Elm uses an approach called the "Actor Model" for managing concurrency through isolated state and message passing, ensuring a reliable way to handle parallelism, whereas Racket provides multiple concurrency models such as threads, channels, and futures, allowing developers to choose the most suitable approach for their application.
6. **Community and Adoption**: Elm has a smaller but growing community focused on building robust web applications, while Racket has a more established community with a strong emphasis on language-oriented programming and academic research.

In Summary, Elm and Racket differ in their type systems, programming paradigms, tooling ecosystems, syntax, concurrency models, and community focuses. Each language has its strengths and is suited for different types of projects and developer preferences.

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Detailed Comparison

Elm
Elm
Racket
Racket

Writing HTML apps is super easy with elm-lang/html. Not only does it render extremely fast, it also quietly guides you towards well-architected code.

It is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It is designed to be a platform for programming language design and implementation. It is also used for scripting, computer science education, and research.

No Runtime Exceptions; Fearless refactoring; Understand anyone's code; Fast and friendly feedback; Enforced Semantic Versioning; Small Assets
Multi-paradigm; Object-oriented;Cross-platform;Powerful macros & languages;DrRacket IDE & tons of documentation
Statistics
Stacks
758
Stacks
92
Followers
744
Followers
83
Votes
319
Votes
54
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 45
    Code stays clean
  • 44
    Great type system
  • 40
    No Runtime Exceptions
  • 33
    Fun
  • 28
    Easy to understand
Cons
  • 3
    No typeclasses -> repitition (i.e. map has 130versions)
  • 2
    JS interoperability a bit more involved
  • 2
    JS interop can not be async
  • 1
    Main developer enforces "the correct" style hard
  • 1
    More code is required
Pros
  • 4
    Meta-programming
  • 3
    Hygienic macros
  • 2
    Beginner friendly
  • 2
    Cross platform GUI
  • 2
    Macro Stepper
Cons
  • 2
    LISP BASED
  • 2
    No GitHub
Integrations
No integrations available
Windows
Windows
Oracle
Oracle
MySQL
MySQL
Cassandra
Cassandra
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
Linux
Linux
IBM DB2
IBM DB2
SQLite
SQLite
macOS
macOS
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server

What are some alternatives to Elm, Racket?

Meteor

Meteor

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

Bower

Bower

Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.

Julia

Julia

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library.

PureScript

PureScript

A small strongly typed programming language with expressive types that compiles to JavaScript, written in and inspired by Haskell.

Composer

Composer

It is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.

pnpm

pnpm

It uses hard links and symlinks to save one version of a module only ever once on a disk. When using npm or Yarn for example, if you have 100 projects using the same version of lodash, you will have 100 copies of lodash on disk. With pnpm, lodash will be saved in a single place on the disk and a hard link will put it into the node_modules where it should be installed.

Bun

Bun

Develop, test, run, and bundle JavaScript & TypeScript projects—all with Bun. Bun is an all-in-one JavaScript runtime & toolkit designed for speed, complete with a bundler, test runner, and Node.js-compatible package manager.

Homebrew

Homebrew

Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple didn’t. Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local.

fpm

fpm

It helps you build packages quickly and easily (Packages like RPM and DEB formats).

SDKMAN

SDKMAN

It provides a convenient way to install, switch, list and remove candidates. Using it, you can now manage parallel versions of multiple SDKs easily on any Unix-like operating system.

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