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  5. Elm vs Rust

Elm vs Rust

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Rust
Rust
Stacks6.1K
Followers5.0K
Votes1.2K
GitHub Stars107.6K
Forks13.9K
Elm
Elm
Stacks758
Followers744
Votes319

Elm vs Rust: What are the differences?

Introduction: Elm and Rust are both programming languages that have gained popularity in recent years. While they have some similarities, they also have key differences that make them unique in their own ways. In this article, we will explore these differences to help you understand which language might be more suitable for your needs.

  1. Syntax and Type Systems: Elm is a functional programming language that has a strong static type system. Its syntax is influenced by Haskell and ML, making it concise and expressive. On the other hand, Rust is a systems programming language that focuses on memory safety and concurrency. It has a unique ownership model, which allows for safe concurrency and memory management. Rust's syntax is similar to C and C++, making it familiar to those with a background in those languages.

  2. Error Handling: Elm and Rust handle errors in different ways. In Elm, error handling is done through the use of the Result type. This type ensures that errors are explicitly handled and can help prevent runtime errors. On the other hand, Rust uses a combination of error types and the Result type to handle errors. Rust's approach is more flexible and allows for more fine-grained control over error handling.

  3. Community and Ecosystem: The communities and ecosystems surrounding Elm and Rust are quite different. Elm has a small but dedicated community, focused on building reliable and maintainable web applications using functional programming principles. The Elm ecosystem is also tightly controlled, with a limited set of libraries and packages available. On the other hand, Rust has a larger and more diverse community, with a wide range of libraries and packages available for different use cases. The Rust ecosystem is known for its focus on performance and safety.

  4. Concurrency and Parallelism: Elm and Rust approach concurrency and parallelism differently. Elm has a single-threaded runtime, which means it can only handle one task at a time. This can make it easier to reason about and debug concurrency issues. Rust, on the other hand, has a powerful concurrency model that allows for fine-grained control over threads and synchronization. This makes it suitable for building high-performance concurrent systems.

  5. Tooling and IDE Support: The tooling and IDE support for Elm and Rust are also different. Elm has a built-in package manager and a command-line interface (CLI) that make it easy to manage dependencies and build projects. It also has excellent support for editor plugins, such as Elm language servers, which provide code completion and syntax highlighting. Rust, on the other hand, has a powerful build system called Cargo, which handles dependency management and project building. It also has excellent support for IDEs like Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ IDEA, with plugins that provide code completion, syntax highlighting, and other useful features.

  6. Target Applications: Elm and Rust are designed for different types of applications. Elm is primarily used for building web applications, with a focus on simplicity, reliability, and maintainability. It is well-suited for building interactive UIs and has a strong emphasis on functional programming and strong typing. Rust, on the other hand, is designed for systems programming, with a focus on performance, safety, and low-level control. It is well-suited for building high-performance applications, libraries, and operating systems.

In summary, Elm and Rust have several key differences that set them apart. Elm is a functional programming language with a strong static type system, focused on web application development. Rust, on the other hand, is a systems programming language with a unique ownership model, focused on performance and safety. The communities, error handling approaches, concurrency models, tooling, and target applications also differ between the two languages.

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Advice on Rust, Elm

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
Omar
Omar

Feb 23, 2021

Needs adviceonRubyRubyJavaScriptJavaScriptRustRust

I was thinking about adding a new technology to my current stack (Ruby and JavaScript). But, I want a compiled language, mainly for speed and scalability reasons compared to interpreted languages. I have tried each one (Rust, Java, and Kotlin). I loved them, and I don't know which one can offer me more opportunities for the future (I'm in my first year of software engineering at university).

Which language should I choose?

443k views443k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Rust
Rust
Elm
Elm

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.

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.

-
No Runtime Exceptions; Fearless refactoring; Understand anyone's code; Fast and friendly feedback; Enforced Semantic Versioning; Small Assets
Statistics
GitHub Stars
107.6K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
13.9K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
6.1K
Stacks
758
Followers
5.0K
Followers
744
Votes
1.2K
Votes
319
Pros & Cons
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
    No jobs
  • 4
    Variable shadowing
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
    No JSX/Template
  • 1
    Backwards compability breaks between releases

What are some alternatives to Rust, Elm?

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.

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.

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.

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