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  5. Go vs Vala

Go vs Vala

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Golang
Golang
Stacks24.0K
Followers13.9K
Votes3.3K
GitHub Stars130.7K
Forks18.4K
Vala
Vala
Stacks114
Followers26
Votes9
GitHub Stars863
Forks78

Go vs Vala: What are the differences?

<Go is a statically typed, compiled programming language, known for its simplicity and efficiency, while Vala is a programming language that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers.>

  1. Syntax and Style: Go uses a more simplified syntax and style compared to Vala's more verbose syntax, making Go code easier to read and write for developers.
  2. Concurrency: Go has built-in support for concurrency through goroutines and channels, which makes it easier to write concurrent programs compared to Vala.
  3. Memory Management: Go has automatic garbage collection, which simplifies memory management for developers, while Vala requires manual memory management.
  4. Standard Library: Go has a rich standard library that provides a wide range of functionality out of the box, while Vala relies more on external libraries for certain tasks.
  5. Platform Independence: Go is designed to be platform-independent, allowing developers to write code that can run on multiple operating systems without modification, whereas Vala is more tightly integrated with the GNOME platform.
  6. Compilation: Go is natively compiled to machine code, enabling high performance, whereas Vala is usually compiled to C code and then to machine code, which may introduce some performance overhead.

In Summary, Go and Vala differ in syntax and style, concurrency support, memory management, standard library, platform independence, and compilation.

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Advice on Golang, Vala

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

Golang
Golang
Vala
Vala

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.

It is a programming language using modern high level abstractions without imposing additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C.

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Multimedia and Graphics; Collections;Files; I/O;Networking; IPC
Statistics
GitHub Stars
130.7K
GitHub Stars
863
GitHub Forks
18.4K
GitHub Forks
78
Stacks
24.0K
Stacks
114
Followers
13.9K
Followers
26
Votes
3.3K
Votes
9
Pros & Cons
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
  • 1
    Easy sintax simular to C#/Java with sugar from Pyrthon
  • 1
    Productive
  • 1
    ARC instead of GC, which is able not only to delete obj
  • 1
    The only lang that allows you to create safe OOP wraps
  • 1
    With GIR/SWIG u can call vala from any lang
Integrations
Revel
Revel
Martini
Martini
FreeBSD
FreeBSD
Linux
Linux
macOS
macOS
Windows
Windows
Mac OS X
Mac OS X

What are some alternatives to Golang, Vala?

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!

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.

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