Go vs Python vs Scala

Overview

Python

Stacks262.9K

Followers205.4K

Votes6.9K

GitHub Stars69.7K

Forks33.3K

Golang

Stacks24.0K

Followers13.9K

Votes3.3K

GitHub Stars130.7K

Forks18.4K

Scala

Stacks11.9K

Followers7.8K

Votes1.5K

GitHub Stars14.4K

Forks3.1K

Go vs Python vs Scala: What are the differences?

Introduction

When comparing programming languages like Go, Python, and Scala, it's essential to understand their key differences. Below are the distinct features that set Go, Python, and Scala apart from each other.

Performance: Go is known for its fast execution and compilation, making it a preferred choice for performance-critical applications. Python, on the other hand, is interpreted, leading to slower execution speed compared to Go. Scala combines the best of both worlds by offering both high-level abstractions and the ability to compile to efficient bytecode for excellent performance.
Concurrency: Go is built with concurrency in mind and provides built-in support for goroutines and channels, making it easy to write concurrent programs. Python's threading is limited due to the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), which hinders true parallelism. Scala, with its Actor model and Akka library, enables developers to build highly concurrent and distributed systems with ease.
Type System: Go is statically typed, which means that variables have predefined types that cannot change during runtime, enhancing code safety. Python, being dynamically typed, allows for more flexibility but can lead to errors due to type mismatches. Scala utilizes a powerful type system supporting type inference, pattern matching, and higher-kinded types, offering a good balance between static and dynamic typing.
Functional Programming: Scala promotes functional programming paradigms like immutability, higher-order functions, and pattern matching, making it ideal for building scalable and maintainable software. Although Python and Go also support functional programming to some extent, they lack some advanced features found in Scala, such as support for tail recursion optimization and algebraic data types.
Tooling and Ecosystem: Go comes with a comprehensive standard library and tools like gofmt and govet, fostering consistency and code quality. Python boasts a rich ecosystem of third-party libraries through PyPI, enabling developers to find solutions for almost any problem. Scala benefits from the Java ecosystem, allowing seamless interoperability with existing Java libraries and tools for enterprise development.
Ease of Learning: Python is renowned for its simplicity and readability, making it an excellent choice for beginners and rapid prototyping. Go follows a minimalist approach with a clean syntax, focusing on simplicity and ease of use. Scala, being a hybrid language, has a steeper learning curve due to its complex type system and functional programming concepts, which may be challenging for beginners.

In Summary, the key differences between Go, Python, and Scala lie in their performance, concurrency support, type systems, functional programming capabilities, tooling ecosystems, and ease of learning.

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Advice on Python, Golang, Scala

Thomas

Talent Co-Ordinator at Tessian

Mar 11, 2020

Decided

In December we successfully flipped around half a billion monthly API requests from our Ruby on Rails application to some new Python 3 applications. Our Head of Engineering has written a great article as to why we decided to transition from Ruby on Rails to Python 3! Read more about it in the link below.

263k views263k

Comments

Ido

Mar 6, 2020

Decided

When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.

You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.

267k views267k

Comments

Brent

CEO at DEFY Labs

Mar 7, 2020

Decided

Node.js has been growing in popularity, and the ability to access the global pool of Javascript developers is great. There is a decreased amount of effort for people to work across the frontend and backend, and the language itself is easy and works well for many common use cases.

Go was the other serious candidate, but it just hasn't been implemented in as many Production systems yet, and the best Go engineers I've known have been hackers, whereas we're building a robust analytics platform that requires more caution. Type safety is easily added with TypeScript, and NPM is awesomely handy.

369k views369k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Python	Golang	Scala
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.	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.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 69.7K	GitHub Stars 130.7K	GitHub Stars 14.4K
GitHub Forks 33.3K	GitHub Forks 18.4K	GitHub Forks 3.1K
Stacks 262.9K	Stacks 24.0K	Stacks 11.9K
Followers 205.4K	Followers 13.9K	Followers 7.8K
Votes 6.9K	Votes 3.3K	Votes 1.5K
Pros & Cons
Pros 1188 Great libraries 967 Readable code 849 Beautiful code 790 Rapid development 692 Large community Cons 53 Still divided between python 2 and python 3 28 Performance impact 26 Poor syntax for anonymous functions 22 GIL 21 Package management is a mess	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	Pros 188 Static typing 178 Pattern-matching 175 Jvm 172 Scala is fun 138 Types Cons 11 Slow compilation time 7 Multiple ropes and styles to hang your self 6 Too few developers available 4 Complicated subtyping 2 My coworkers using scala are racist against other stuff
Integrations
Django	Revel Martini	Java

What are some alternatives to Python, Golang, Scala?

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.

PHP

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

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 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!

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# (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.

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

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 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 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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