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Ask HN: “Best” Functional Language for the Web (key on Performance)

by orph4nus on 3/31/15, 10:28 AM with 9 comments

Hey. I'm planning on developing a free web game as a hobby project. The game will have quite a lot of calculations as it will rely heavily on fractal generation, pseudo variants and other forms of generation on the fly. But without going to much in details (as I'm still in the early prototyping phases) I would like to know what these days the best functional language for the web is?

I only ever do web development for hobby projects, as I'm a developer for personal computers and embedded systems in my professional time. I like to develop in Functional Languages as It fits best with how I think and come up with solutions for my problems. Besides one web project that I developed with Clojurescript I don't have much experience with functional languages for the web though. Which brings me to the question...

What functional languages do you recommend for the web? Clojurescript, Elixir, Erlang, or another one? Key elements I look for is completeness of libraries available and performance.

Thank you upfront.

  • by orph4nus on 3/31/15, 10:57 AM

    The main problem that i had with Clojurescript was that it seemed to be quite intensive even for the simple puzzle game that I made. Note that it may be because I hacked the program in one night and probably raped the language horrible. Which is why I'm still open for Clojurescript suggestions by people who have good experiences using it.

  • by user1241320 on 4/3/15, 6:50 PM

    I'm surprised nobody mentioned elm*

    *http://elm-lang.org

  • by davidw on 3/31/15, 10:30 AM

    Erlang is not for computationally intensive stuff - but it could easily be used to control something that is, like a C program.

  • by guilt on 3/31/15, 10:45 AM

    I like Scala because of the amount of Libraries, Concurrency Primitives available.

    Algebird is one of my favorite projects of all time.