Difference Between Groovy vs Scala
What is Scala?
- Scala is an acronym for Scalable Language.
- Scala is a general purpose Object Oriented programming language that supports functional programming capabilities.
- Scala runs on Java Virtual Machine (JVM), the source code is intended to be compiled to Java bytecode.
- Scala has many features of a functional programming language such as Scheme, Standard ML, Lazy evaluation, pattern matching etc.
- Scala also has an advanced type system supporting algebraic data types, covariance and contravariance, higher-order types, and anonymous types.
What is Groovy?
- Apache Groovy is an Object-Oriented programming language runs on Java Platform.
- Groovy can be used both as a programming language and scripting language that runs on Java Platform and the code is compiled to bytecode on Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
- Groovy is both static and dynamic typing and supports various features like operator overloading, lists, and associative arrays and many more, it also supports regular expressions.
- Groovy also supports various markup languages like HTML and XML.
- Groovy can use a lot of existing Java libraries.
Head To Head Comparison Between Groovy vs Scala (Infographics)
Below is the top 8 difference between Groovy vs Scala:
Key Difference Between Groovy vs Scala
As you can see there are many difference between Groovy vs Scala. Let’s look at the top difference between Groovy vs Scala:
- Static Members: Groovy has a concept of static members and methods whereas Scala doesn’t have the static concept, instead, it uses singleton object in place of static members or methods.
- Syntax: Groovy provides native support for markup languages like XML and HTML using libraries like Grails, Glide etc., whereas Scala also provides the support for the markup languages through various libraries like Scala Tags, Udash, static tags and many more.
- Overloading (Multi-Methods or Multiple dispatches): Multiple dispatches is nothing but having multiple methods with same name but different parameters that is nothing but the concept of overloading. Groovy supports multiple dispatches at the runtime due to the way it handles java overloading and Scala is single dispatch but uses pattern matching to deal with multiple dispatches.
- Learning Curve: Groovy is relatively simple and requires less time to learn whereas Scala might take more time to ramp up on the language as it involves a lot of new things.
- Type checking: Groovy is dynamically typed that is type checking happened during the runtime and Scala is statically typed here type checking happened during compile time.
Groovy vs Scala Comparison Table
Below is the top Comparison between Groovy vs Scala.
|The basis of comparison between Groovy vs Scala||Groovy||Scala|
|Adoption||It can be used as a scripting language on top of java codebase such as in log configuration, in Gradle build framework etc.||it is commonly used to build an entire application in the big data domain.|
|Object-Oriented||It is not a pure object-oriented language||It is pure object-oriented language|
|Compatibility with Java||It can use all the java libraries||It can use all the java libraries|
|Inheritance||Groovy supports multiple inheritance||Scala supports multiple inheritance using traits|
|Support for Markup language||It provides native support for languages like XML and HTML||It provides support for generating HTML docs using scalatex language|
|Access Modifiers||By default, the access modifier is public||In Scala also by default, the access modifier is public|
|Test and Deploy||It has tools like Gradle and Spock that has become quite popular in the Java community and in used android development toolkit||It has tools like Scala Test, SBT, Junit etc., which are the most powerful framework on JVM|
|Integrated Tools||It has tools like Java, Grails||It has tools like Java, Auth0, UDash, ScalaNLP and many more|
Performance Table between Groovy vs Scala
Below is the Performance Table between Groovy vs Scala.
|Performance based on Groovy vs Scala||Groovy||Scala|
|IDE’s||Groovy has IDE’s like Groovy Eclipse, Groovy tool suite.
Groovy tool suite is an Eclipse-based IDE which provides lots of metrics for the developers and Groovy-Eclipse is from eclipse foundation that provides a lot of inbuilt tools for developers.
Provides better performance since it has a lot of IDE’s with a lot of inbuilt tools in it.
|Scala has IDE’s like Scala IDE for Eclipse and NetBeans.
Scala IDE for Eclipse provides dedicated support for developing pure Scala and NetBeans IDE allows developers to quickly and easily develop desktop, mobile and web applications. Same with Scala as well
|Concurrency and Parallelism||Groovy has one libraray called G Pars that offers concurrency and parallelism for the application||Scala uses the JVM and does well on single threaded performance, also has libraries like Akka and Spark that offers Machine Learning, futures, promises, data flow and actors|
|Speed||Groovy is very slow to run, due to its dynamic typing. But has faster compile cycle||Scala is very slow to compile but has faster execution cycle.|
|Ease of Use||Groovy is used for rapid prototyping and development.||Scala is used for developing full fledge productive applications.|
Conclusion – Groovy vs Scala
As we have seen that there is a lot of difference between Groovy vs Scala it is hard to say which programming language is better. Neither of them is better or worse than other. Both Groovy vs Scala languages target two different classes of problems. Scala is a high-performance language that is very similar to java but without much of the boilerplate code as java and has many features that java doesn’t. Groovy on the other hand is used for developing prototypes where speed is less important than the time it takes for the programmers to implement the code. Based on the problem type you can choose either of the language for your development purpose.
This has been a guide to the top difference between Groovy vs Scala. Here we also discuss the Groovy vs Scala key differences with infographics, and comparison table. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more