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  5. Erlang vs Julia

Erlang vs Julia

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Erlang
Erlang
Stacks1.4K
Followers749
Votes345
GitHub Stars11.9K
Forks3.0K
Julia
Julia
Stacks666
Followers677
Votes171
GitHub Stars47.9K
Forks5.7K

Erlang vs Julia: What are the differences?

# Introduction

Erlang and Julia are two popular programming languages, each with its unique features and applications. Below are the key differences between Erlang and Julia.

1. **Design Paradigm**: Erlang is a functional programming language that focuses on concurrency, fault tolerance, and distributed computing, while Julia is a high-level dynamic programming language primarily used for technical computing and numerical analysis.

2. **Typing System**: Erlang is dynamically typed, allowing variables to be bound to values of any type during runtime, whereas Julia is a dynamically and optionally statically typed language, providing more flexibility in typing.

3. **Performance**: Erlang is known for its lightweight processes and soft-real-time performance, making it suitable for telecom applications and fault-tolerant systems, whereas Julia is designed for high performance with just-in-time (JIT) compilation and extensive support for parallel computing.

4. **Syntax**: Erlang has a Prolog-like syntax with pattern matching, immutability, and functional programming constructs, making it suitable for building scalable and fault-tolerant systems, while Julia has a syntax similar to MATLAB, with a focus on mathematical operations, data analysis, and optimization.

5. **Community and Ecosystem**: Erlang has a mature ecosystem with libraries and frameworks tailored for distributed systems and telecommunications, supported by the Erlang/OTP platform, whereas Julia has a growing community focusing on scientific computing, machine learning, and data science, with a rich ecosystem of packages like JuliaPro and Flux.

6. **Learning Curve**: Erlang is known for its steep learning curve due to its niche use cases and unique features like actor model concurrency, while Julia provides a more accessible learning curve for users familiar with MATLAB, Python, or R, thanks to its flexible and expressive syntax.

In Summary, Erlang emphasizes fault tolerance and distributed systems with a functional programming approach, while Julia prioritizes high-performance technical computing with dynamic and optionally static typing.

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Advice on Erlang, Julia

Alexander
Alexander

Senior researcher at MIPT

Oct 27, 2020

Decided

After writing a project in Julia we decided to stick with Kotlin. Julia is a nice language and has superb REPL support, but poor tooling and the lack of reproducibility of the program runs makes it too expensive to work with. Kotlin on the other hand now has nice Jupyter support, which mostly covers REPL requirements.

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Detailed Comparison

Erlang
Erlang
Julia
Julia

Some of Erlang's uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang's runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop these systems.

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.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
11.9K
GitHub Stars
47.9K
GitHub Forks
3.0K
GitHub Forks
5.7K
Stacks
1.4K
Stacks
666
Followers
749
Followers
677
Votes
345
Votes
171
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 62
    Real time, distributed applications
  • 62
    Concurrency Support
  • 58
    Fault tolerance
  • 36
    Soft real-time
  • 32
    Open source
Cons
  • 1
    Languange is not popular demand
Pros
  • 25
    Fast Performance and Easy Experimentation
  • 22
    Designed for parallelism and distributed computation
  • 19
    Free and Open Source
  • 17
    Dynamic Type System
  • 17
    Calling C functions directly
Cons
  • 5
    Immature library management system
  • 4
    Slow program start
  • 3
    JIT compiler is very slow
  • 3
    Poor backwards compatibility
  • 2
    Bad tooling
Integrations
No integrations available
GitHub
GitHub
Azure Web App for Containers
Azure Web App for Containers
GitLab
GitLab
Slack
Slack
C++
C++
Rust
Rust
C lang
C lang
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow
vscode.dev
vscode.dev
Python
Python

What are some alternatives to Erlang, Julia?

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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