Posts tagged "Scala’s advantages"

Developer

The Battle Between Scala and Rust

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The Battle Between Scala and Rust

Over the last few years, we’ve been using Scala to build data pipelines, stream processing, and many other applications; at the same time, we’ve been hearing many positive things about Rust. This article aims to provide a comprehensive comparison between both languages, no matter what their role is.

An overview of Scala

Scala was the first language developed by scholars to run on the Java Virtual Machine as an alternative to Java. In Scala, you get the benefits of both functional and object-oriented programming.

Like Scheme, Standard ML, and Haskell, Scala has many functional programming features, such as currying, type inference, immutability, lazy evaluation, and pattern matching. Java compatibility issues still exist with this powerful but difficult-to-learn language.

Scala’s advantages

You can express any kind of problem in Scala in a very different way than you can in Java or Go. Besides being compatible with Java, it comes with all the optimizations built into the JVM over the years. There are tons of features included in the type system, including building custom DSLs for your libraries, enforcing checks at compile time, etc.

Scala’s disadvantages

It is difficult to master and learn. In a large project, maintaining code consistency is difficult. There are some compatibility issues with Java, and if you need Java libraries, Scala loses its advantages. Due to its large container size and difficulty in tuning, it inherits the JVM issues for cloud-native applications.

An overview of Rust

Originally developed at Mozilla in 2006, Rust achieved its first stable release in 2015. Designed for performance and safety, Rust is a general-purpose programming language that supports multiple paradigms.

Many companies have been using it over the last 5 years, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Facebook, Mozilla, Dropbox, and Cloudflare. There is no garbage collection in Rust, and reference counting is optional. To maintain the same level of performance, Rust was originally developed to replace C++.

Rust’s advantages

It is extremely fast and efficient. It offers a wide range of features, such as closures, pattern matching, collections, generics, etc. Easily readable and concise. A cargo package manager is an excellent tool.

It can interact with existing C programs and is compatible with C. The community behind it is thriving, and it is truly open source. Cost-effective and low energy consumption. It has grown rapidly and is becoming more popular. It handles errors very well.

Rust’s disadvantages

Since it does not have native concurrency support, you have to use libraries to do this. Even though the number of production-grade applications is growing, there are not many currently in production. Quite a challenge to learn, especially the ownership model.

Comparison between Scala and Rust

Scala is the most suitable choice for Big Data/Data Processing. Akka is a beast of its own and can handle a large number of requests without relying on any external libraries. Besides the actor library in Rust, there is also Actix-web, one of the fastest HTTP servers on the market, beating virtually any HTTP server written in Scala.

The Scala Play Framework is best suited for stateful web applications or applications that last for a long time. As a result, the JVM has enough time to optimize the application. A systems programming language, Rust, is focused on performance, low resource usage, and low-level details. This new and simpler programming language aims to replace C++ completely.

There is some difference between Scala and Rust, but Rust is not far behind. Only some features, such as higher-order types or tail recursion checks, are missing at the moment, but they will be added shortly. WebAssembly is the major component of WebAssembly, which is supported by the Rust first class. Compared to Rust, Scala is a better choice for Big Data (Spark and Hadoop ecosystems).

Developer

What’s the Difference Between Scala and Go?

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What’s the Difference Between Scala and Go?

There is a great deal of difference between Go and Scala. To address criticisms of C, Google created Go, a newer, simpler language. Among its niches are concurrency and Big Data processing, whereas Scala is an older, more mature programming language. There is no doubt that both languages are capable of providing excellent performance for concurrent applications.

An overview of Scala

The Scala programming language aims to express common programming patterns concisely, elegantly, and type-safely. Your programs can be defined in any way you desire, and you are in control of how you describe them.

A functional programming language such as Scheme, Haskell, or Scheme has many features that Java does not. Additionally, it supports functional programming and has a robust static type system. Anonymous functions can be defined in Scala using a lightweight syntax. Among its features are the ability to nest functions and the support for higher-order functions.

There are still some issues with Java compatibility with Scala as it is a very powerful language but hard to learn. As a result of Scala’s better concurrency support, companies such as Twitter have switched to the language. Compared to other languages, Scala has not found a lot of use in the real world due to its academic nature.

Scala’s advantages

The JVM optimizations that have been built over the course of the years are included, and it is compatible with Java. You can build custom DSLs for your libraries using the type system. Any kind of problem can be expressed using this powerful tool.

Scala’s disadvantages

Cloud-native applications inherit JVM issues, such as large container sizes, slow warm-up times, difficulty tuning, and slow deployment. Java compatibility issues, and if Java libraries are required, Scala’s advantages are compromised.

An overview of Go

Google created Go, which is syntactically similar to C. It was designed to increase the parallelism of concurrent programs on multicore machines. Despite being fast to compile, Go has garbage collection and runtime reflection power.

This is suitable for cloud-native applications packaged in containers due to its small and efficient binary size.

Go’s advantages

Compared to interpreted languages, it is a very fast compiler. The small size, no warm-up times, and speed of Go make it a wise choice for cloud-native applications and Kubernetes. You can use it in many different situations: web applications, CLIs, and stream processing, for example. In comparison to the JVM, it uses very little RAM and CPU.

Go’s disadvantages

There are not many libraries or tutorials for Go, as it is a relatively new language. Although Generics will be added to it soon, basic things like them are not available yet. However, dependencies have improved since the addition of go mod, which makes them easier to manage. It is not as elegant, mature, powerful, or flexible as Scala.

Final words

Each has its strengths and weaknesses. For cloud-native applications, GO is the most cost-effective language. But for Big Data and highly concurrent critical systems, Scala is the most suitable choice.