StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Languages
  4. Languages
  5. Julia vs Kotlin vs Rust

Julia vs Kotlin vs Rust

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Rust
Rust
Stacks6.1K
Followers5.0K
Votes1.2K
GitHub Stars107.6K
Forks13.9K
Kotlin
Kotlin
Stacks17.7K
Followers11.9K
Votes650
GitHub Stars51.5K
Forks6.1K
Julia
Julia
Stacks667
Followers677
Votes171
GitHub Stars47.9K
Forks5.7K

Julia vs Kotlin vs Rust: What are the differences?

Introduction

Julia, Kotlin, and Rust are three different programming languages, each with its own unique features and use cases. In this comparison, we will highlight the key differences between Julia, Kotlin, and Rust, focusing on their specific characteristics and strengths.

  1. Syntax and Purpose: Julia is a high-level numerical computing language with a focus on performance and productivity. It provides a concise syntax that resembles mathematical notation and is designed for scientific computing and data analysis. Kotlin, on the other hand, is a general-purpose language that can be used for developing Android applications, backend services, and other software projects. Rust is a systems programming language that emphasizes security, memory safety, and concurrency.

  2. Memory Management: Julia uses a garbage collector for memory management, which automatically frees memory when it is no longer needed. In contrast, Kotlin uses automatic memory management through garbage collection, but also provides support for manual memory management through native pointers. Rust, however, uses a unique approach called ownership system, where the compiler enforces strict rules on memory allocation and deallocation to prevent common memory-related bugs such as null pointer dereferences and data races.

  3. Concurrency and Parallelism: Julia has built-in support for lightweight tasks, allowing efficient execution of concurrent code. It also provides high-level abstractions for parallel computing, making it easier to utilize multiple cores and distributed computing resources. Kotlin provides coroutines, which are lightweight threads that can be used for asynchronous programming and concurrent execution. Rust, on the other hand, uses a "fearless concurrency" model with its ownership system, enabling safe concurrent programming without the need for locks or other synchronization primitives.

  4. Tooling and Ecosystem: Julia has a growing ecosystem of packages and libraries for various domains, such as scientific computing, machine learning, and data visualization. It also provides a rich set of tools for package management, debugging, and profiling. Kotlin benefits from being fully compatible with Java, allowing developers to leverage the vast Java ecosystem and tools. It also has excellent integration with popular development environments like IntelliJ IDEA. Rust has a strong focus on developer tooling, providing a package manager called Cargo, an integrated build system, and extensive tooling support for tasks like testing and documentation generation.

  5. Performance: Julia is known for its high performance, thanks to its just-in-time (JIT) compilation and extensive optimization capabilities. It can often match or even outperform languages like C or Fortran for certain types of numerical computations. Kotlin, being a higher-level language, may not offer the same level of raw performance as Julia for numerical computing, but it provides good performance for general-purpose applications and can leverage performance-critical libraries through interop with other languages. Rust, on the other hand, aims to provide both high-level abstractions and low-level control over performance. Its emphasis on memory safety and efficient abstractions allows developers to write highly performant code without sacrificing safety.

  6. Community and Adoption: Julia has a relatively small but growing community of users and contributors, with a focus on scientific computing and data analysis. Kotlin has gained significant popularity in recent years, especially for Android development, with a large and active community. Rust has seen rapid adoption, particularly in the systems programming domain, with strong support from organizations like Mozilla and a vibrant community.

In summary, Julia is a powerful language for numerical computing and data analysis, Kotlin is a versatile language for general-purpose development, and Rust provides a safe and efficient programming environment for systems programming. Each language has its own strengths and areas of focus, making them suitable for different types of projects and use cases.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Rust, Kotlin, Julia

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
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
Zuriel
Zuriel

Jun 7, 2020

Needs advice

Can anyone help me decide what's best for app development or even android Oreo development? I'm in a state dilemma at the moment. I want to do Android programming, not necessarily web development. I have heard a lot of people recommend one of these, and it seems that both the tools can do the job. Which language would you choose?

291k views291k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Rust
Rust
Kotlin
Kotlin
Julia
Julia

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.

Kotlin is a statically typed programming language for the JVM, Android and the browser, 100% interoperable with Java

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
107.6K
GitHub Stars
51.5K
GitHub Stars
47.9K
GitHub Forks
13.9K
GitHub Forks
6.1K
GitHub Forks
5.7K
Stacks
6.1K
Stacks
17.7K
Stacks
667
Followers
5.0K
Followers
11.9K
Followers
677
Votes
1.2K
Votes
650
Votes
171
Pros & Cons
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
  • 6
    No jobs
  • 4
    Many type operations make it difficult to follow
Pros
  • 74
    Interoperable with Java
  • 55
    Functional Programming support
  • 51
    Null Safety
  • 47
    Official Android support
  • 44
    Backed by JetBrains
Cons
  • 7
    Java interop makes users write Java in Kotlin
  • 4
    Frequent use of {} keys
  • 2
    Hard to make teams adopt the Kotlin style
  • 2
    Nonullpointer Exception
  • 1
    Slow compiler
Pros
  • 25
    Fast Performance and Easy Experimentation
  • 22
    Designed for parallelism and distributed computation
  • 19
    Free and Open Source
  • 17
    Dynamic Type System
  • 17
    Calling C functions directly
Cons
  • 5
    Immature library management system
  • 4
    Slow program start
  • 3
    Poor backwards compatibility
  • 3
    JIT compiler is very slow
  • 2
    Bad tooling
Integrations
No integrations availableNo integrations available
GitHub
GitHub
Azure Web App for Containers
Azure Web App for Containers
GitLab
GitLab
Slack
Slack
C++
C++
C lang
C lang
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow
vscode.dev
vscode.dev
Python
Python
Jupyter
Jupyter

What are some alternatives to Rust, Kotlin, Julia?

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.

Meteor

Meteor

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

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.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot