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  5. Erlang vs Rust

Erlang vs Rust

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Erlang
Erlang
Stacks1.4K
Followers749
Votes345
GitHub Stars11.9K
Forks3.0K
Rust
Rust
Stacks6.1K
Followers5.0K
Votes1.2K
GitHub Stars107.6K
Forks13.9K

Erlang vs Rust: What are the differences?

Introduction

Erlang and Rust are two programming languages with distinct characteristics and purposes. Understanding the key differences between these languages can help developers choose the right tool for a particular task or project.

  1. Concurrency and distribution: One major difference between Erlang and Rust is their approach to concurrency and distribution. Erlang is designed with concurrency in mind, providing lightweight processes that can execute independently and communicate through message passing. This makes Erlang suitable for applications that require high scalability and fault tolerance, such as telecom systems and distributed computing. On the other hand, Rust does not have native support for concurrency and distribution like Erlang. Instead, it focuses on safe and efficient low-level programming, making it well-suited for systems programming and building reliable software.

  2. Memory management: Memory management is another significant difference between Erlang and Rust. Erlang uses automatic garbage collection, which means developers don't need to manually allocate and deallocate memory. This simplifies the development process but can lead to potential performance issues in certain situations. In contrast, Rust employs a unique ownership system that guarantees memory safety and eliminates common issues like null pointers and data races. This ownership system allows developers to write high-performance code while ensuring memory safety.

  3. Error handling: Erlang and Rust also differ in their approach to error handling. In Erlang, errors are often handled through a "let it crash" philosophy, where individual processes handle errors independently, and the system as a whole recovers from failures. This fault-tolerant approach is well-suited for building robust systems that can recover from errors automatically. In contrast, Rust follows a strict approach to error handling using its "Result" type, forcing developers to explicitly handle errors using "match" statements, which promotes safer and more predictable code.

  4. Language design philosophy: Erlang and Rust have different design philosophies. Erlang prioritizes developer productivity and fault tolerance, offering a high-level, dynamic language with features like pattern matching and hot code swapping. This makes Erlang suitable for rapid development and fault-tolerant systems. On the other hand, Rust emphasizes safety, performance, and control, leveraging a low-level, statically-typed language with strong compile-time guarantees. This design choice enables developers to write efficient code while ensuring memory safety and preventing common programming errors.

  5. Community and ecosystem: Another difference lies in the community and ecosystem surrounding Erlang and Rust. Erlang has a long history and a mature ecosystem, driven by its use in telecommunications and distributed systems. It has well-established libraries and tools, as well as a dedicated community. Rust, on the other hand, is a relatively young language with a rapidly growing community. Its ecosystem is evolving quickly, with an increasing number of libraries and tools being developed. Rust's community also places a strong emphasis on safety, performance, and code quality.

  6. Learning curve and adoption: Erlang and Rust also differ in their learning curve and adoption. Erlang, with its unique syntax and concurrency model, can take some time for developers to grasp fully. However, due to its wide adoption in certain domains, there is a significant pool of Erlang developers available. Rust, being a relatively newer language, may have a steeper learning curve, especially for developers without a background in systems programming. However, Rust's popularity is rapidly growing due to its safety guarantees and performance benefits, and it is increasingly being adopted in various domains.

In summary, Erlang and Rust differ in their approach to concurrency and distribution, memory management, error handling, language design philosophy, community and ecosystem, as well as learning curve and adoption. Understanding these differences is crucial for choosing the most suitable language for specific projects or tasks.

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Advice on Erlang, 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
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

Erlang
Erlang
Rust
Rust

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.

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
11.9K
GitHub Stars
107.6K
GitHub Forks
3.0K
GitHub Forks
13.9K
Stacks
1.4K
Stacks
6.1K
Followers
749
Followers
5.0K
Votes
345
Votes
1.2K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 62
    Concurrency Support
  • 62
    Real time, distributed applications
  • 58
    Fault tolerance
  • 36
    Soft real-time
  • 32
    Open source
Cons
  • 1
    Languange is not popular demand
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
    Variable shadowing
  • 4
    Many type operations make it difficult to follow

What are some alternatives to Erlang, 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.

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