Fortran vs. Java vs. Nim vs. Rust Comparison Chart

Fortran has been designed from the ground up for computationally intensive applications in science and engineering. Mature and battle-tested compilers and libraries allow you to write code that runs close to the metal, fast. Fortran is statically and strongly typed, which allows the compiler to catch many programming errors early on for you. This also allows the compiler to generate efficient binary code. Fortran is a relatively small language that is surprisingly easy to learn and use. Expressing most mathematical and arithmetic operations over large arrays is as simple as writing them as equations on a whiteboard. Fortran is a natively parallel programming language with intuitive array-like syntax to communicate data between CPUs. You can run almost the same code on a single CPU, on a shared-memory multicore system, or on a distributed-memory HPC or cloud-based system.

Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Nim generates native dependency-free executables, not dependent on a virtual machine, which are small and allow easy redistribution. Nim's memory management is deterministic and customizable with destructors and move semantics, inspired by C++ and Rust. It is well-suited for embedded, hard-realtime systems. Modern concepts like zero-overhead iterators and compile-time evaluation of user-defined functions, in combination with the preference of value-based datatypes allocated on the stack, lead to extremely performant code. Support for various backends: it compiles to C, C++ or JavaScript so that Nim can be used for all backend and frontend needs.