Go vs Scala

Difference Between Go vs Scala

Let’s consider a scenario in today’s IT industry. But before that some facts and figures about IT companies around the world. As per the stock exchange around 50K companies are listed. Talking of US alone there is 1 company for every 11 people. These numbers are growing continuously. There are several reasons for the growth some of the crucial ones is modernization, our dependence towards easier life, business factors and most importantly reliability.

Actually talking these factors have made the competitions so fierce that a small mistake in an analysis of tools and technologies can lead to spending a huge cost in terms of project completion and moreover a chance of scoring a project in future.  Every company is trying to scale up with an intention to deliver quality software products to their clients.

With so many languages and tools available in the market it becomes really difficult for the managers and team heads to choose from that can deliver a quality for its client with good business relations.

This article deal with two of the programming languages – Go vs Scala

Both Go vs Scala has their own advantages and Limitations. This depends upon the nature of the project and clients requirement specifically.

GO – which is often called as GOlang is a Programming language (PL) developed by Google.  It’s a statically typed, compiled language in the tradition of C. The tools, compiler and source code are a free and open source. (Source Wiki)

SCALA – It’s a general purpose programming language which provides support for functional programming and a strong static type system. (Source-Wiki).

Head To Head Comparison Between Go vs Scala (Infographics)

Below is the top 8 difference between Go vs Scala

Key Differences Between Go vs Scala

Both Go and Scala are popular choices in the market; let us discuss some of the major Difference Between Go vs Scala:

While choosing programming languages every company does some calculations or you can say observation (from past experiences). Some of these are discussed below.

• Lesser code work is easier to understand
• The person who frequently uses a set of code or maintains it is not the one who created it (often).

Writing a code is more of communication, not just between author and compiler but also between author and future readers (unknown skill level). These factors are crucial to determine at the planning phase of the project to avoid hindrance in delivery and smooth operations.

1. Simplicity – Go is more simple compared to Scala. The language specification page for Scala is more than 191 pages whereas GO has only 51 pages and so. This simplicity is crucial for the team to decide to move swiftly into a project.
2. RISC and CISC – A CPU’s architecture can be of RISC and CISC model.

RISC – reduced instruction set computing

CISC – Complex instruction set computing

RISC model uses only the simpler commands that further gets subdivided into many instructions to achieve low-level operation within a single CLK cycle just the way its name suggests reduced instruction set computing.

CISC – Here a single instruction can perform several low- level operations just the way it is pronounced. These low-level operations can be either of these memory load, Athematic operations etc.

Back to Scala vs Go based on this model, GO provides a simpler and smaller set of orthogonal primitives that easily interact among them with ease and expected way. A developer can easily build his need by learning a small number of primitives whereas SCALA has a huge toolbox set and syntax. One has to learn in detail and has a proper understanding of when to use these primitives for writing a few lines of code.

3. Practical

Let’s see a case comparing these two practices. Consider fetching a user id from a cookie.
Try to understand this case and analyze how much of coding understanding is needful before one is capable of doing this

• What if the cookie is not present?
• If the cookie value is not in standard format number?
• And also what if the cookie assigned value is a negative one?

SCALA

import play.api.mvc.RequestHeader
def getUserId()(implicit request: RequestHeader) = {
cookies.get("uid").map(_.value.toLong).filter(_ > 0)
}

GO

import (
"fmt"
"http"
"strconv"
)
func getUserId(r *http.Request) (int64, error) {
c, err := r.Cookie("uid")
if err != nil {
return 0, err
}
i, err := strconv.ParseInt(c.Value, 10, 64)
if err != nil {
return 0, err
}
if i <= 0 {
return 0, fmt.Errorf("invalid user id")
}
return i, nil
}

Here one can see that SCALA code is smaller compared to GO but the thing is to GO is explicit whereas SCALA requires context to understand.

Explicit codes are easier to understand for novice

Explicit code is easier to edit the changes

One can easily understand the error for explicit codes

These are even easier to debug.

4. Scalable concurrent solution –

Talking of Scala vs Go, it is worth noticing that what these PL can offer your company.
SCALA is a persistent data structure, functional programming using first class and closure, Software transactional memory whereas GO is a lightweight machine code language, based on concepts of goroutines and UNIX pipe-like channels, high-speed compilation and simple abstraction mechanism.

Go vs Scala Comparison Table

Below is the topmost comparison between Go vs Scala

Conclusion – Go vs Scala

SCALA is built on top of JVM. SCALA supports built-in through a variety of built-in classes and 3^rd party frameworks. GO provides concurrency in the form of goroutines and channels. A PL features and compatibility decides whether it will fit the available resources of the team or not. Factors like code availability, understanding behavior, complexity to write code and understand by others.

Recommended Article

This has a been a guide to the top difference between Go vs Scala. Here we also discuss the Go vs Scala key differences with infographics, and comparison table. You may also have a look at the following Go vs Scala articles to learn more –

1. C++ vs Go Comparison
2. Node.js vs Go
3. Python vs Scala
4. Scala vs Java Performance