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General comparison

The following table compares general and technical information for a selection of commonly used programming languages. See the individual languages' articles for further information.

Type systems

Main article: Comparison of programming languages by type system

Failsafe I/O and system calls

Most programming languages will print an error message or throw an exception if an input/output operation or other system call (e.g., chmod, kill) fails, unless the programmer has explicitly arranged for different handling of these events. Thus, these languages fail safely in this regard.

Some (mostly older) languages require that programmers explicitly add checks for these kinds of errors. Psychologically, different cognitive biases (e.g., optimism bias) may affect novices and experts alike and lead them to skip these checks. This can lead to erroneous behavior.

Failsafe I/O is a feature of 1C:Enterprise, Ada (exceptions), ALGOL (exceptions or return value depending on function), Ballerina, C#, Common Lisp ("conditions and restarts" system), Curry, D (throwing on failure),⁴⁷ Erlang, Fortran, Go (unless result explicitly ignored), Gosu, Harbour, Haskell, ISLISP, Java, Julia, Kotlin, LabVIEW, Mathematica, Objective-C (exceptions), OCaml (exceptions), OpenLisp, PHP, Python, Raku, Rebol, Rexx (with optional signal on... trap handling), Ring, Ruby, Rust (unless result explicitly ignored), Scala,⁴⁸ Smalltalk, Standard ML , Swift ≥ 2.0 (exceptions), Tcl, Visual Basic, Visual Basic .NET, Visual Prolog, Wolfram Language, Xojo, XPath/XQuery (exceptions), and Zeek.

No Failsafe I/O: AutoHotkey (global ErrorLevel must be explicitly checked), C,⁴⁹ COBOL, Eiffel (it actually depends on the library and it is not defined by the language), GLBasic (will generally cause program to crash), RPG, Lua (some functions do not warn or throw exceptions), and Perl.⁵⁰

Some I/O checking is built in C++ (STL iostreams throw on failure but C APIs like stdio or POSIX do not)⁵¹ and Object Pascal, in Bash⁵² it is optional.

Expressiveness

The literature on programming languages contains an abundance of informal claims about their relative expressive power, but there is no framework for formalizing such statements nor for deriving interesting consequences.⁵⁵ This table provides two measures of expressiveness from two different sources. An additional measure of expressiveness, in GZip bytes, can be found on the Computer Language Benchmarks Game.⁵⁶

Benchmarks

Benchmarks are designed to mimic a particular type of workload on a component or system. The computer programs used for compiling some of the benchmark data in this section may not have been fully optimized, and the relevance of the data is disputed. The most accurate benchmarks are those that are customized to your particular situation. Other people's benchmark data may have some value to others, but proper interpretation brings many challenges. The Computer Language Benchmarks Game site warns against over-generalizing from benchmark data, but contains a large number of micro-benchmarks of reader-contributed code snippets, with an interface that generates various charts and tables comparing specific programming languages and types of tests.⁵⁷

Timeline of specific language comparisons

• 1974 – Comparative Notes on Algol 68 and PL/I⁵⁸ – S. H. Valentine – November 1974
• 1976 – Evaluation of ALGOL 68, JOVIAL J3B, Pascal, Simula 67, and TACPOL Versus TINMAN – Requirements for a Common High Order Programming Language.
• 1977 – A comparison of PASCAL and ALGOL 68⁵⁹ – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – June 1977.
• 1993 – Five Little Languages and How They Grew – BLISS, Pascal, ALGOL 68, BCPL & C – Dennis M. Ritchie – April 1993.
• 2009 – On Go – oh, go on – How well will Google's Go stand up against Brand X programming language? – David Given – November 2009

See also

• Comparison of programming languages (basic instructions)
• Comparison of programming languages (syntax)
• Comparison of integrated development environments
• Comparison of multi-paradigm programming languages
• TIOBE index

Further reading

• Cezzar, Ruknet (1995). A Guide to Programming Languages: Overview and Comparison. Artech House. ISBN 978-0-89006-812-0.

References

1. As of May 2006 Diarmuid Pigott's Encyclopedia of Computer Languages Archived 2011-02-20 at the Wayback Machine hosted at Murdoch University, Australia lists 8512 computer languages. http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/ ↩

2. Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, 3.9 Tagged Types and Type Extensions http://www.adaic.org/standards/05rm/html/RM-TTL.html ↩

3. Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, Section 6: Subprograms http://www.adaic.org/standards/05rm/html/RM-TTL.html ↩

4. Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, Section 12: Generic Units http://www.adaic.org/standards/05rm/html/RM-TTL.html ↩

5. Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, Section 9: Tasks and Synchronization http://www.adaic.org/standards/05rm/html/RM-TTL.html ↩

6. Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3 Annex E: Distributed Systems http://www.adaic.org/standards/05rm/html/RM-TTL.html ↩

7. "Vak.ru" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-03-30. Retrieved 2008-08-09. https://web.archive.org/web/20170330020459/http://vak.ru/lib/exe/fetch.php/book/gost/pdf/gost-27831-88.pdf ↩

8. ISO 1538:1984 http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/docs/oldwgs/wg6.html ↩

9. "Vak.ru" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-03-24. Retrieved 2008-08-09. https://web.archive.org/web/20170324231641/http://vak.ru/lib/exe/fetch.php/book/gost/pdf/gost-27974-88.pdf ↩

10. IEEE 694-1985 https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/694/950/ ↩

11. Objects - Definition & Usage https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/Objects.htm ↩

12. "Ballerina Language Specification" (PDF). WSO2. 2018-05-01. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-05-04. Retrieved 2018-05-03. https://web.archive.org/web/20180504090305/https://ballerina.io/res/Ballerina-Language-Specification-WD-2015-05-01.pdf ↩

13. POSIX.2, Shell and Utilities, Command Interpreter (IEEE Std 1003.2-1992.) /wiki/POSIX.2 ↩

14. JSR 274 http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=274 ↩

15. bell-labs.com https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html ↩

16. ANSI C89, ISO/IEC 9899:1990, 1999, 2011, 2018 http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG14/ ↩

17. ISO/IEC 14882:1998, 2003, 2011, 2014, 2017, 2020 http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/ ↩

18. Codeproject.com: Functional Programming in C# 3.0 using Lambda Expression http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/intro_functional_csharp.aspx ↩

19. ECMA-334; ISO/IEC 23270:2006 ↩

20. Softvelocity.com http://www.softvelocity.com ↩

21. "Crystal". GitHub. 2 November 2021. https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal#why ↩

22. "Crystal Generics". crystal-lang.org. 13 April 2024. https://crystal-lang.org/reference/1.12/syntax_and_semantics/generics.html ↩

23. "Concurrency - Crystal". crystal-lang.org. Retrieved 2024-04-02. https://crystal-lang.org/reference/1.11/guides/concurrency.html ↩

24. Basic Eiffel language mechanisms http://se.ethz.ch/~meyer/publications/online/eiffel/basic.html#Agents: ↩

25. Closure (computer programming) /wiki/Closure_(computer_programming)#Inline_agents_.28Eiffel.29: ↩

26. ECMA-367; ISO/IEC 25436:2006 ↩

27. The Go Programming Language (FAQ) https://golang.org/doc/faq#Is_Go_an_object-oriented_language ↩

28. "Codewalk: First-Class Functions in Go". Go supports first class functions, higher-order functions, user-defined function types, function literals, closures, and multiple return values. This rich feature set supports a functional programming style in a strongly typed language. https://go.dev/doc/codewalk/functions/ ↩

29. JSR 241 http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=241 ↩

30. "The Haskell 2010 Language Report". Retrieved 2011-12-07. Most Haskell implementations extend the Haskell 2010 standard. http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/ ↩

31. "M8 is out!". 2 July 2014. As a first peek into the future reflective capabilities of Kotlin, you can now access properties as first-class objects in Kotlin http://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2014/07/m8-is-out/ ↩

32. POSIX.2, Shell and Utilities, Command Interpreter (IEEE Std 1003.2-1992.) /wiki/POSIX.2 ↩

33. Halcyon (Inworldz) and Open Sims propose compatible implementations with additional functions. ↩

34. Lua does not have explicit "object" type (more general type of "table" is used for object definition), but does have explicit syntax for object method calling ↩

35. Version releases are accompanied with a definitive Lua Reference Manual showing full syntax and semantics; a reference implementation, and a test suite. These are used to generate other Lua VM implementations and compilers such as Kahlua and LLVM-Lua. /wiki/Virtual_machine ↩

36. ISO/IEC 10514-1:1996 ↩

37. ISO 7185 ↩

38. PHP Manual, Chapter 19. Classes and Objects (PHP 5), http://php.net/manual/en/index.php ↩

39. PHP Manual, Chapter 17. Functions http://php.net/manual/en/index.php ↩

40. "PostScript Language Reference Manual" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-02-18. Retrieved 2017-02-18. https://web.archive.org/web/20170218093716/https://www.adobe.com/products/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf ↩

41. Is Rust an Object-Oriented Programming Language? https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch17-00-oop.html ↩

42. Klabnik, Steve; Nichols, Carol. "Macros". The Rust Programming Language. https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-06-macros.html ↩

43. R3RS, R4RS, R5RS, R6RS, R7RS Small Edition https://standards.scheme.org/ ↩

44. R0RS, R1RS, R2RS https://standards.scheme.org/early/ ↩

45. SMLNJ.org http://www.smlnj.org/sml97.html ↩

46. POSIX.2, Shell and Utilities, Command Interpreter (IEEE Std 1003.2-1992.) /wiki/POSIX.2 ↩

47. "STD.stdio - D Programming Language". https://dlang.org/phobos/std_stdio.html ↩

48. Scala runs on the Java Virtual Machine from which it inherits the runtime exception handling. ↩

49. gcc can warn on unchecked errno. Newer versions of Visual Studio usually throw exceptions on failed I/O when using stdio. /wiki/GNU_compiler_collection ↩

50. Considerable error checking can be enabled optionally, but by default Perl is not failsafe. ↩

51. gcc can warn on unchecked errno. Newer versions of Visual Studio usually throw exceptions on failed I/O when using stdio. /wiki/GNU_compiler_collection ↩

52. set -e enables termination if any unchecked exit status is nonzero. /wiki/Exit_status ↩

53. Data from McConnell, Steve (30 November 2009). Code Complete. Microsoft Press. p. 100. ISBN 9780735636972. The Statements ratio column "shows typical ratios of source statements in several high-level languages to the equivalent code in C. A higher ratio means that each line of code in the language listed accomplishes more than does each line of code in C. 9780735636972 ↩

54. The ratio of line count tests won by each language to the number won by C when using the Compare to feature at McLoone, Jon (November 14, 2012). "Code Length Measured in 14 Languages". Archived from the original on 2012-11-19. C gcc was used for C, C++ g++ was used for C++, FORTRAN G95 was used for FORTRAN, Java JDK Server was used for Java, and Smalltalk GST was used for Smalltalk. https://web.archive.org/web/20121119043607/https://blog.wolfram.com/2012/11/14/code-length-measured-in-14-languages/ ↩

55. Felleisen, Matthias. On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages. ESOP '90 3rd European Symposium on Programming. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.51.4656. /wiki/CiteSeerX_(identifier) ↩

56. "How programs are measured". Computer Language Benchmarks Game. Retrieved 2018-05-29. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/how-programs-are-measured.html#source-code ↩

57. "The Ultimate Benchmark". The Computer Language Benchmarks Game. Retrieved 2018-05-29. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/dont-jump-to-conclusions.html ↩

58. Valentine, S. H. (November 1974). "Comparative Notes on Algol 68 and PL/I". The Computer Journal. 17 (4): 325–331. doi:10.1093/comjnl/17.4.325. https://doi.org/10.1093%2Fcomjnl%2F17.4.325 ↩

59. "Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam" (PDF). http://dare.ubvu.vu.nl/bitstream/1871/2609/1/11054.pdf ↩