Java vs. Pine Script vs. Visual Basic vs. ZenScript Comparison Chart

Pine Script® is TradingView’s programming language. It allows traders to create their own trading tools and run them on our servers. We designed Pine Script® as a lightweight, yet powerful, language for developing indicators and strategies that you can then backtest. Most of TradingView’s built-in indicators are written in Pine Script®, and our thriving community of Pine Script® programmers has published more than 100,000 community scripts. It’s our explicit goal to keep Pine Script® accessible and easy to understand for the broadest possible audience. Pine Script® is cloud-based and therefore different from client-side programming languages. While we likely won’t develop Pine Script® into a full-fledged language, we do constantly improve it and are always happy to consider requests for new features. Because each script uses computational resources in the cloud, we must impose limits in order to share these resources fairly among our users.

ZenScript originated from MineTweaker where a simple programming language is needed to allow users without programming knowledge to be able to execute simple commands by following the tutorials for it. Originally MineTweaker had a simple one-line-at-a-time parsed scripting system, but it quickly became clear that it wasn't flexible enough, so a simple parsed language was created. This parsed language worked quite well but was very inefficient as each value was wrapped into its own object. ZenScript allows mixed typed and typeless behavior. You don't need to define types anywhere, the compile will infer them where possible and exhibit typeless behavior when the type is effectively unknown. In nearly all the cases, the type is perfectly known and execution runs at native Java speed. Since there are types, they can be documented and enforced.