You forgot that beauty - “undefined behavior”!
Memory-safety can guarantee only so much safety! C++ can still blow up in your face, even with all the alleged memory-safety built into C++, thanks to all the UB traps in C and C++.
Rust is the closest language that has no such “gotchas”.
C# is good too. If you havent heard of lobster you should look into it.
C# isn’t exactly compiled, at least not into machine language. It is transpiled into byte code that is run on a virtual machine that on turn is an interpreter/JIT-compiler.
Depending on why someone is asking for a compiled language that may or may not be a problem, because to the one writing the code it looks like a compiled language, but to the one running it it looks like an interpreted one.
It is compiled to bye code. Just to be clear transpiling is completely different. It is also not interpreted.
But ahead of time compilation is available now. So you can compile straight machine code.
The newer tiered JIT can actually give better performance than a traditional compiler as well.
Overall C# is an awesome language. If performance is absolutely critical you can use raw pointers and manual memory management, but obviously you lose safety then.
Not necessarily these days! With NativeAOT, C# can be compiled to machine code.
It is compiled into bytecode. A transpiler translates to another programming language with the same level of abstraction. A compiler translates into a level that is nearer to or machine code.
Gleam?
https://gleam.run/Honest question, what would make you pick Gleam over Elixir? Both seem to have significant overlap
Isn’t Elixer dynamically typed?
Oh, I forgot that detail, makes sense. Does Gleam already have something equivalent to Phoenix for elixir?
I dunno it looks well designed but I dunno why I would use it instead of Rust.
Elm, which is the loveliest language ever.
But I’m not sure if compiles to javascript counts as compiled, in which case haskell, which is considerably less lovely but still good.
Roc isn’t finished, but it might turn out lovely, I don’t know.
Transpiles :)
Ada, hands down. Every time I go to learn Rust I’m disappointed by the lack of safety. I get that it’s miles ahead of C++, but that’s not much. I get that it strikes a much better balance than Ada (it’s not too hard to get it to compile) but it still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of safe interfacing. Plus it’s memory model is more complicated than it needs to be (though Ada’s secondary stack takes some getting used to).
I wonder if any other Ada devs have experience with rust and can make a better comparison?
its* memory model is
I have done quite a bit of C, C++, Ada, and Pascal development. I recently got into Rust. I am still getting used to Rust, but it feels a bit like someone tried to apply Ada to C++. I like the modern development environment, but I am slower writing code than I would be in Ada or C++. The one feature of Ada that I really like and want other languages to adopt is the Rep spec. I write driver code and being able to easily and explicitly identify which symbol corresponds to which bit is really good.
I would use Ada or Spark in a heartbeat if there was an easy-to-use, mature cross-platform GUI library for it.
You mean… except Ada?
purescript if you count “compile to js” as compiled.
Otherwise Haskell
That’s transpiling, not compiling. Compiling is usually meant as “directly to machine code”, but I am yet to find an “official definition”.
transpiling is just a type of compiling. compiling in no terms means ‘directly to machine code’.
There is no official definition, in part because there isn’t any formal way to define the term that satisfies our intuition.
Most treatments will handle “transpiling” as a special case of “compiling” and some will even handle decompilation as a special case where the object language is higher level than the source. Of course, even defining “higher level” can be quite hard.
Plenty of languages “compile to C” and I see no issue with saying something “compiles to js,” especially given that js mostly lacks features of purescript rather than the other way around.
I started learning Go about 3 months ago and it quickly became one of my favorite languages. It feels like C with a bunch of Python niceties thrown in. And performance isn’t super critical in my work so being garbage collected is fine with me.
That is a very specific subset
Garbage collection is still allowed, and technically JIT languages are still compiled so it really isn’t that restrictive
Java, the language so good you compile it twice!
Not that specific tbh, most newer native languages these days are compiled and memory safe (Rust, Swift, Go, Kotlin Native, etc)
Rust and Haskell (I think Haskell counts)
Nim. Small compiler, small executables, easy to understand (except the macros, I still can’t get my head around them).
FreePascal. Yeah yeah, Pascal’s dead, etc etc, but it being so verbose and strict certainly help programmers (or at least me) keeping things somewhat tidy.
Also shoutout to V
People don’t understand that JIT languages are still compiled, JIT literally describes when it’s compiled.
That said, F# and/or OCaml.
Java
As others have said, Haskell and Rust are pretty great. A language that hasn’t been mentioned that I REALLY want to catch on, though, is Unison.
Honorable mention to my main driver lately: Purescript
Tell us more about unison
Hard to describe in one phrase other than to say:
NixOS is to Linux as Unison is to Haskell
Content-addressing used in the context of programming languages in the service of solving the problem of distributed systems and their inability to share code across time and space.
Haskell has a content-addressed module that was perhaps influenced by Unison.
Here’s an excellent interview with one of the authors of Unison:
Python with MyPy.
(Almost any language can meet those criteria, with enough shenanigans.)
But that’s not compiled, not to binary at least.
But that’s not compiled, not to binary at least.
Well…sort of.
(Everything is weirder than it seems at first glance.)
