RemObjects Mercury vs. Visual Basic vs. ZenScript vs. python-sql Comparison Chart

Mercury is an implementation of the BASIC programming language that is fully code-compatible with Microsoft Visual Basic.NET™, but takes it to the next level, and to new horizons. With Mercury, you will be able to build your existing VB.NET projects and leverage your Visual Basic™ language experience to write code for any modern target platform. You can mix Mercury code with any of the other five Elements languages in the same project if you like! The Mercury language will be deeply integrated into our development environments. Develop your projects in our smart yet lightweight IDEs, Water on Windows or Fire on Mac, with project templates, code completion, integrated debugging for all platforms, and many other advanced development features. Of course, Mercury will also integrate into Visual Studio™ 2017, 2019 and 2022. With Elements, all languages are created equal. Even within the same project, you can mix Mercury, C#, Swift, Java, Oxygene and Go.

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.