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Erlang vs Julia: What are the differences?
# Introduction
Erlang and Julia are two popular programming languages, each with its unique features and applications. Below are the key differences between Erlang and Julia.
1. **Design Paradigm**: Erlang is a functional programming language that focuses on concurrency, fault tolerance, and distributed computing, while Julia is a high-level dynamic programming language primarily used for technical computing and numerical analysis.
2. **Typing System**: Erlang is dynamically typed, allowing variables to be bound to values of any type during runtime, whereas Julia is a dynamically and optionally statically typed language, providing more flexibility in typing.
3. **Performance**: Erlang is known for its lightweight processes and soft-real-time performance, making it suitable for telecom applications and fault-tolerant systems, whereas Julia is designed for high performance with just-in-time (JIT) compilation and extensive support for parallel computing.
4. **Syntax**: Erlang has a Prolog-like syntax with pattern matching, immutability, and functional programming constructs, making it suitable for building scalable and fault-tolerant systems, while Julia has a syntax similar to MATLAB, with a focus on mathematical operations, data analysis, and optimization.
5. **Community and Ecosystem**: Erlang has a mature ecosystem with libraries and frameworks tailored for distributed systems and telecommunications, supported by the Erlang/OTP platform, whereas Julia has a growing community focusing on scientific computing, machine learning, and data science, with a rich ecosystem of packages like JuliaPro and Flux.
6. **Learning Curve**: Erlang is known for its steep learning curve due to its niche use cases and unique features like actor model concurrency, while Julia provides a more accessible learning curve for users familiar with MATLAB, Python, or R, thanks to its flexible and expressive syntax.
In Summary, Erlang emphasizes fault tolerance and distributed systems with a functional programming approach, while Julia prioritizes high-performance technical computing with dynamic and optionally static typing.
Decisions about Erlang and Julia
Alexander Nozik
Senior researcher at MIPT · | 3 upvotes · 172.4K views
After writing a project in Julia we decided to stick with Kotlin. Julia is a nice language and has superb REPL support, but poor tooling and the lack of reproducibility of the program runs makes it too expensive to work with. Kotlin on the other hand now has nice Jupyter support, which mostly covers REPL requirements.
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Learn MorePros of Erlang
Pros of Julia
Pros of Erlang
- Concurrency Support60
- Real time, distributed applications60
- Fault tolerance56
- Soft real-time35
- Open source31
- Functional programming21
- Message passing20
- Immutable data15
- Works as expected13
- Facebook chat uses it at backend5
- Practical4
- Knowledgeable community4
- Bullets included3
Pros of Julia
- Fast Performance and Easy Experimentation24
- Designed for parallelism and distributed computation21
- Free and Open Source18
- Dynamic Type System17
- Multiple Dispatch16
- Calling C functions directly16
- Lisp-like Macros16
- Powerful Shell-like Capabilities10
- Jupyter notebook integration9
- REPL8
- String handling4
- Emojis as variable names4
- Interoperability3
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Cons of Erlang
Cons of Julia
Cons of Erlang
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Cons of Julia
- Immature library management system5
- Slow program start4
- JIT compiler is very slow3
- Poor backwards compatibility3
- Bad tooling2
- No static compilation2
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What is Erlang?
Some of Erlang's uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang's runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop these systems.
What is Julia?
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.
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Jobs that mention Erlang and Julia as a desired skillset
What companies use Erlang?
What companies use Julia?
See which teams inside your own company are using Erlang or Julia.
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What tools integrate with Erlang?
What tools integrate with Julia?
What tools integrate with Erlang?
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What are some alternatives to Erlang and Julia?
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.
Haskell
It is a general purpose language that can be used in any domain and use case, it is ideally suited for proprietary business logic and data analysis, fast prototyping and enhancing existing software environments with correct code, performance and scalability.
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.
Clojure
Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.
Akka
Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM.