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  5. Go vs Ruby vs Rust

Go vs Ruby vs Rust

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Ruby
Ruby
Stacks46.0K
Followers21.8K
Votes4.0K
GitHub Stars23.0K
Forks5.5K
Golang
Golang
Stacks24.0K
Followers13.9K
Votes3.3K
GitHub Stars130.7K
Forks18.4K
Rust
Rust
Stacks6.1K
Followers5.0K
Votes1.2K
GitHub Stars107.6K
Forks13.9K

Go vs Ruby vs Rust: What are the differences?

Go, Ruby, and Rust are all programming languages that are used for different purposes and have their own unique features and characteristics. While Go is known for its simplicity, concurrency, and strong typing, Ruby is popular for its expressive syntax and flexibility, and Rust is praised for its memory safety and performance. Now let's dive into the key differences between these three languages.
  1. Syntax and Expressiveness: Ruby is well-known for its expressive and elegant syntax, which allows developers to write code that is easy to read and understand. It has a concise and flexible syntax that enables developers to write code that looks like natural language. Go, on the other hand, focuses on simplicity and readability. It has a more strict and minimalistic syntax that makes the code easy to write and maintain. Rust also has a fairly strict syntax, which aims to prevent common programming errors and promote safe code.

  2. Concurrency and Multithreading: Go has built-in support for concurrent programming, which allows developers to write efficient and scalable concurrent programs. It has goroutines and channels that simplify the handling of concurrent tasks. Ruby, on the other hand, has a Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) that restricts true parallelism and limits the effectiveness of multithreading. Rust provides low-level control over threads and has features like ownership and borrowing that guarantee memory safety even in a multithreaded environment.

  3. Runtime Performance: Go is designed to be a fast and efficient language, with a focus on high-performance applications. It has a garbage collector that manages memory automatically and reduces the risk of memory leaks. Ruby, being an interpreted language, is generally slower than Go, but it compensates for it with its simplicity and productivity. Rust, being a systems programming language, focuses on providing high performance and control over system resources. It compiles to native code, and its zero-cost abstractions result in efficient execution.

  4. Memory Safety and Error Handling: Rust is known for its focus on memory safety. It enforces strict compile-time checks to prevent common programming errors like null pointer dereferencing and memory leaks. It also provides an alternative to exceptions called "Result" which enforces proper error handling. Go, while not as strict as Rust, also provides memory safety through its strong typing and garbage collector. Ruby, being a dynamically-typed language, is not as strict when it comes to memory safety.

  5. Community and Ecosystem: Ruby has a large and vibrant community that has created a rich ecosystem of libraries and frameworks. It is widely used in web development and has popular frameworks like Ruby on Rails. Go, although relatively newer compared to Ruby, has a growing community and a good number of libraries and frameworks. It is known for its simplicity and is often used in backend and distributed systems development. Rust has a smaller but highly active community. It is gaining popularity in areas like system programming, game development, and embedded systems.

  6. Learning Curve and Documentation: Ruby is considered to have a relatively easy learning curve due to its expressive syntax and friendly community. It has extensive documentation and many resources available for beginners. Go also has a relatively easy learning curve, thanks to its simplicity and readability. The Go team has invested a lot in providing good documentation and resources for beginners. Rust, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve due to its focus on memory safety and ownership. However, it has an excellent official documentation and a supportive community that helps beginners learn the language effectively.

In Summary, Go, Ruby, and Rust differ in their syntax, concurrency support, runtime performance, memory safety, community, and learning curve. Go focuses on simplicity and concurrency, Ruby on expressive syntax and flexibility, and Rust on memory safety and performance.

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Advice on Ruby, Golang, Rust

Ido
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
Ítalo
Ítalo

VP Platform Engineering at Lykon

Feb 19, 2020

Decided

We decided to use python to write our ETLs and import them into metabase via a lambda. Before python we tried using Go, but overall go was way more verbose than Python when writing the ETLs. Go also had some issues managing memory when using the S3 upload manager library. This was a deal breaker for us that made us switch to Python.

In the end the solution was much cleaner and maintainable.

261k views261k
Comments
Mohamed
Mohamed

Software Engineer at YottaHQ Inc.

Dec 2, 2019

Decided

PHP is easy to learn and you can get up and running in no time, available on almost all hosting providers and you can find developers easily. It has some great frameworks for building your backend like Symfony and Laravel. However, it can be challenging when running an enterprise and needs some adjustments, very recommended for starting a new project or startup.

208k views208k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Ruby
Ruby
Golang
Golang
Rust
Rust

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.

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.

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
23.0K
GitHub Stars
130.7K
GitHub Stars
107.6K
GitHub Forks
5.5K
GitHub Forks
18.4K
GitHub Forks
13.9K
Stacks
46.0K
Stacks
24.0K
Stacks
6.1K
Followers
21.8K
Followers
13.9K
Followers
5.0K
Votes
4.0K
Votes
3.3K
Votes
1.2K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 608
    Programme friendly
  • 538
    Quick to develop
  • 492
    Great community
  • 469
    Productivity
  • 432
    Simplicity
Cons
  • 7
    Really slow if you're not really careful
  • 7
    Memory hog
  • 3
    Nested Blocks can make code unreadable
  • 2
    Encouraging imperative programming
  • 1
    No type safety, so it requires copious testing
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
  • 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
    Many type operations make it difficult to follow
Integrations
Rails
Rails
Revel
Revel
Martini
Martini
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Ruby, Golang, 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.

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!

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.

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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