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Rust vs Scala
Introduction
I’ve been using Scala for a few years now, building a wide range applications, from stream processing to data pipelines; at the same time, I’ve been hearing many good things about Rust, so recently I decided to spend time learning Rust.
Both languages, although created to achieve different goals, share some similarities. During the last few months I’ve been taking notes to try to wrap my ahead around the use cases where each language would be a better fit. This article is the culmination of this research. My goal is to compare both languages from different angles and from the different points of view so anyone regardless of their role can have a complete picture of the similarities and differences of each language.
Both are great languages that can achieve great performance for concurrent applications but their design is quite different. Scala is an older and more mature programming language that has found its niche in areas such concurrent programming and Big Data processing. Rust, in the other hand, is a newer language created to overcome the criticisms of C++, since it is new, it adopted many of the constructs from other languages while fixing many of the pain points of older languages.
Scala is based on the JVM and is be considered a general purpose programming language. Rust, in the other hand, is a systems programming language that was created to solve the memory safety issues of C++ and other problems while keeping the amazing performance that C++ is famous for.
In this article, I will try give you a quick overview of both languages, their advantages and drawbacks and review some real word use cases where we will recommend one language over the other.
Scala in a nutshell
Scala is a programming language created by scholars and it was the first alternative to Java running on the JVM. It defines itself as:
Scala is a modern multi-paradigm programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way.[1]
Scala is both, functional and object oriented, providing the best of both worlds. It has a flexible way to define…
