Updated March 4, 2023
Difference between Haskell and Scala
Haskell is a general-purpose programming language that is standardized and has pure functional programming features. It was developed and designed by Lennart Augustsson, John Hughes, Paul Hudak, John Launchbury, Simon Peyton Jones, Philip Wadler, and Erik Meijer. Its typing discipline is strong, static, inferred, and has no strict semantics. It was licensed under Clause 3 BSD license. Its features are lazy, non-strict and modular programming. It first appeared in the year 2010. Its file extension is .hs or .lhs and supports cross-platform operating system.
Scala is a general-purpose programming language which has strong functional programming features. It is a static, inferred, strong and structural programming language. Its’ file extension names are .scala or .sc. It first appeared in the year 2004. It supports different platforms such as JVM, JavaScript, and LLVM etc. It is most popular for the client-server kind of applications. It was licensed under Clause 3 BSD license. The latest version of Scala is released in September 2018. Martin Odersky designed it. The source code of Scala has converted Java bytecode which can be run on JVM. Scala has features similar to that of programming languages such as Haskell, Standard ML, and Scheme. Programming Methods of Laboratory developed it.
Head To Head Comparison Between Haskell and Scala (Infographics)
Below is the top 9 difference between Haskell vs Scala
Key Differences between Haskell and Scala
Both are recommended options in the business. Let us examine some of the key difference:
- Haskell is a functional programming language, whereas Scala is a functional and object-oriented programming language.
- Haskell has referential transparency; its functions are pure first-class functions, whereas Scala does not guarantee referential transparency and does not have pure functions.
- Haskell has a non-strict lazy evaluation feature and optional eager evaluation, whereas Scala has an optional lazy evaluation feature and strict eager evaluation.
- Haskell is completely declarative in nature, exception handling through monads, whereas Scala supports imperative constructs and language level exception handling.
- Haskell supports point freestyle while defining a function and polymorphic string literal, whereas Scala has features such as imperative programming with mutable state, while loops, code blocks etc.
- Haskell has different compiler extensions such as view patterns, kind polymorphism, generic programming, whereas Scala has features such as object-oriented programming, Mixin classes, default arguments, string interpolation, implicit conversion and flexible scoping.
- In Haskell, everything is an expression and has immutable variable by default, full type inference, interpreted and compiled implementations, whereas Scala has features such as structural typing, dynamic typing etc.
- Haskell gives greater productivity, high performance at runtime, a large library and tool support ecosystem and a steep learning curve, whereas Scala has a clever community though not larger than Haskell and can easily be transited to Java, C++ or C# with greater performance.
- Haskell has a compilation model as Glasgow Haskell Compilation (GHC) Model, whereas Scala has a compilation model which is similar to that of C++ and Java.
- Haskell does not support multiple libraries or third-party tools, whereas Scala supports many libraries compatible with JVM.
- Haskell has pure functional programming features that support cross-platform operating systems or different platforms, whereas Scala supports interoperability with Java and re-usage of large libraries or third-party tools available.
- Haskell is more suitable for high algorithm work in terms of coding and strong functional features, whereas Scala has impure functional programming features.
- Haskell has a simple syntax and easy to use with simple features, whereas Scala has complicated syntax and complex features.
- Haskell is concise, safe and faster to use, whereas Scala is also concise, fast and safer with many libraries support.
- Haskell has first-class functions and pure, whereas Scala is strict and impure to use in terms of functional programming features.
- Haskell has a complete type inference feature, whereas Scala has an incomplete type inference feature.
- Haskell has a GHC compiler, which has advanced features in the system which do not present in Scala, whereas Scala has a strict name annotation feature by default.
Haskell vs Scala Comparison Table
As you can see, there are many Comparison between Haskell vs Scala. Let’s look at the top Comparison.
| The basis of comparison |
Haskell |
Scala |
| Definition | It is a general-purpose programming language which has pure functional programming features. | It is compiled to JVM bytecode and is compatible with the Java Platform. |
| Usage | It is used in the case of lazy evaluation. | It is used as a functional programming language and object-oriented language. |
| Features | It has first-class functions and parametric polymorphism. | It has immutability, type inference, and concurrency control. |
| Platform | It supports any operating systems or platforms. | It supports JVM, JavaScript, and LLVM. |
| Syntax | The syntax is strong typing. | It has strong and inferred discipline in its syntax. |
| Community | It has a Haskell Community with a large number of individual developers. | It has a community that is smaller compared to the Haskell |
| License | It was licensed under Clause 3 BSD license | It was licensed under Clause 3 BSD license |
| Functional | It is a purely functional programming language | It is a functional and object-oriented programming language. |
| Documentation | It provides documentation with offline support and instant search. | It has in-depth documentation covering all the functional programming features. |
Conclusion
Scala vs Haskell both are functional programming languages, whereas Scala support object-oriented programming language features as well. The requirement in the object-oriented language, along with functional programming language, gives weight to Scala. The choice of the programming language depends on the functionalities and features as required to make the application work efficiently by making the trade-off choice in an effective manner. Haskell has a template Haskell, and Scala has Macros in its’ features.
Scala is mostly used, and recently, Scala is allowed in providing an environment to be run on JavaScript or JVM platforms. So Scala can be considered for any kind of application requirement in the case of larger applications that need faster development scope and easier to develop complex services or applications where the case of optimization, messaging features and many other efficient techniques are available in the Java Enterprise environment. Haskell is a purely functional programming language and supports powerful functional programming language features.
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