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  5. Go vs Java vs PHP

Go vs Java vs PHP

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

PHP
PHP
Stacks147.4K
Followers82.9K
Votes4.6K
GitHub Stars39.6K
Forks8.0K
Java
Java
Stacks148.0K
Followers105.5K
Votes3.7K
Golang
Golang
Stacks24.0K
Followers13.9K
Votes3.3K
GitHub Stars130.7K
Forks18.4K

Go vs Java vs PHP: What are the differences?

# Introduction

1. **Concurrency Model**: Go utilizes goroutines and channels for concurrent programming, while Java and PHP rely on threads. Goroutines in Go are lightweight and allow for efficient parallel processing, making it easier to work with concurrency. Java and PHP's thread-based concurrency can be more resource-intensive and complex to manage.
  
2. **Static vs. Dynamic Typing**: Go is statically typed, which means that variable types are checked at compile time, providing more reliability and performance optimization. On the other hand, Java and PHP are dynamically typed, allowing for more flexibility but potentially leading to runtime errors due to type mismatches.

3. **Memory Management**: Go uses a garbage collector to manage memory automatically, reducing the risk of memory leaks and making memory management easier for developers. In contrast, Java and PHP require manual memory management, which can be error-prone and time-consuming for complex applications.

4. **Compilation and Execution**: Go compiles directly to machine code, resulting in faster execution speed compared to Java and PHP, which rely on virtual machines to run their programs. This difference in compilation approach can lead to better performance in Go for certain applications.

5. **Error Handling**: Go uses explicit error handling through multiple return values, making it clear when a function can fail and providing control over error recovery. Java and PHP, on the other hand, often rely on exceptions for error handling, which can lead to less predictable behavior and potentially create code that is more difficult to reason about.

6. **Package Management**: Go has a built-in dependency management tool called "go modules" that allows for versioned dependencies and simplified package management. Java relies on external tools like Maven or Gradle for managing dependencies, while PHP uses Composer. The ease of use and integration of package management tools can vary between these programming languages.

In Summary, Go, Java, and PHP differ in handling concurrency, typing, memory management, compilation, error handling, and package management, each with its unique advantages and trade-offs.

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Advice on PHP, Java, Golang

Nick
Nick

Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream

Sep 5, 2019

Review

I work at Stream and I'm immensely proud of what our team is working on here at the company. Most recently, we announced our Android SDK accompanied by an extensive tutorial for Java and Kotlin. The tutorial covers just about everything you need to know when it comes to using our Android SDK for Stream Chat. The Android SDK touches many features offered by Stream Chat – more specifically, typing status, read state, file uploads, threads, reactions, editing messages, and commands. Head over to https://getstream.io/tutorials/android-chat/ and give it a whirl!

176k views176k
Comments
TooManyCarbs
TooManyCarbs

Jan 15, 2020

Needs advice

We are converting AWS Lambdas from Java due to excessive cold start times. Usage: These lambdas handle XML and JSON payloads, they use s3, API Gateway, RDS, DynamoDB, and external API's. Most of our developers are only experienced in java. These three languages (Go, Node.js, and Python) were discussed, but no consensus has been reached yet.

449k views449k
Comments
Jordan
Jordan

Cloud Operations Manager at Plainsight AI

Jan 16, 2020

Decided

A number of years ago; I had done python for a long time prior to learning about Go. Most of what I wrote was system-like things and web-things in python, and I got tired of running into the lack-of-a-type-system problems that python gave me. I wanted to switch to a compiled, strongly-typed system that wasn't C/C++ (been there, done that, got the "shoot yourself in the foot" t-shirt). I looked into both Rust/Go, and for what I wanted to do (system/web) stuff ... at the time, Go was the strongest candidate, so I switched and never went back. Recently I started to re-look at Rust for system things, but for anything I do that I have to touch the web with, it will be Go from now on.

172k views172k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

PHP
PHP
Java
Java
Golang
Golang

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

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!

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.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
39.6K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
130.7K
GitHub Forks
8.0K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
18.4K
Stacks
147.4K
Stacks
148.0K
Stacks
24.0K
Followers
82.9K
Followers
105.5K
Followers
13.9K
Votes
4.6K
Votes
3.7K
Votes
3.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 954
    Large community
  • 820
    Open source
  • 767
    Easy deployment
  • 488
    Great frameworks
  • 387
    The best glue on the web
Cons
  • 21
    So easy to learn, good practices are hard to find
  • 16
    Inconsistent API
  • 8
    Fragmented community
  • 6
    Not secure
  • 3
    No routing system
Pros
  • 608
    Great libraries
  • 446
    Widely used
  • 401
    Excellent tooling
  • 396
    Huge amount of documentation available
  • 334
    Large pool of developers available
Cons
  • 33
    Verbosity
  • 27
    NullpointerException
  • 17
    Nightmare to Write
  • 16
    Overcomplexity is praised in community culture
  • 12
    Boiler plate code
Pros
  • 557
    High-performance
  • 398
    Simple, minimal syntax
  • 365
    Fun to write
  • 305
    Easy concurrency support via goroutines
  • 273
    Fast compilation times
Cons
  • 43
    You waste time in plumbing code catching errors
  • 25
    Verbose
  • 23
    Packages and their path dependencies are braindead
  • 16
    Google's documentations aren't beginer friendly
  • 15
    Dependency management when working on multiple projects
Integrations
Laravel
Laravel
JavaScript
JavaScript
Spring
Spring
Revel
Revel
Martini
Martini

What are some alternatives to PHP, Java, Golang?

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.

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.

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.

Swift

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.

Rust

Rust

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.

Clojure

Clojure

Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.

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