Best Free Programming Languages - Page 2
View:
Compare the Top Free Programming Languages as of April 2025 - Page 2
Sort By:
-
1
Julia
Julia
Julia was designed from the beginning for high performance. Julia programs compile to efficient native code for multiple platforms via LLVM. Julia uses multiple dispatch as a paradigm, making it easy to express many object-oriented and functional programming patterns. The talk on the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Multiple Dispatch explains why it works so well. Julia is dynamically typed, feels like a scripting language, and has good support for interactive use. Julia provides asynchronous I/O, metaprogramming, debugging, logging, profiling, a package manager, and more. One can build entire Applications and Microservices in Julia. Julia is an open source project with over 1,000 contributors. It is made available under the MIT license.Starting Price: Free -
2
Wolfram Language
Wolfram Language
We comply with providing the computational paradigm. The Wolfram Language provides access to computing power at a significantly higher level than ever before, leveraging built-in computational intelligence based on a wide variety of algorithms and real-world knowledge, carefully integrated over three decades. The Wolfram Language is scalable for programs both small and large, with out-of-the-box deployment both on-premises and in the cloud. In addition, the Wolfram Language builds on clear principles and an elegant unified symbolic framework to create what is now emerging as the world's most productive programming language, and the first true computational communication language for humans and AI.Starting Price: Free -
3
Lua
Lua Language
Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode with a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping. Lua has a deserved reputation for performance. To claim to be "as fast as Lua" is an aspiration of other scripting languages. Several benchmarks show Lua as the fastest language in the realm of interpreted scripting languages. Lua is fast not only in fine-tuned benchmark programs, but in real life too. Substantial fractions of large applications have been written in Lua.Starting Price: Free -
4
Erlang
Erlang
Erlang is a programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability. Some of its uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang's runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop these systems. It includes its own distributed database, applications to interface towards other languages, debugging and release handling tools.Starting Price: Free -
5
Ring
Ring
The Ring is a practical general-purpose multi-paradigm language. The supported programming paradigms are imperative, procedural, object-oriented, declarative using nested structures, functional, meta programming and natural programming. The language is portable (Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, WebAssembly, etc.) and can be used to create Console, GUI, Web, Games and Mobile applications. The language is designed to be simple, small and flexible. The language is simple, trying to be natural, encourage organization and comes with transparent and visual implementation. It comes with compact syntax and a group of features that enable the programmer to create natural interfaces and declarative domain-specific languages in a fraction of time. It is very small, flexible and comes with smart garbage collector that puts the memory under the programmer control. It supports many programming paradigms, comes with useful and practical libraries.Starting Price: Free -
6
Vala
The GNOME Project
Vala is a programming language using modern high level abstractions without imposing additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C. Vala uses the GObject type system and has additional code generation routines that make targeting the GNOME stack simple. Vala has many other uses where native binaries are required. More. There is GNOME Discourse for developer and general discussions. You can also join the Vala Matrix channel for asking questions and talking with the developers. Vala is a cross platform development tool with third party distributions providing binaries for Windows, macOS, Linux, BSDs and other platforms.Starting Price: Free -
7
Dylan
Dylan
It is dynamic while providing a programming model designed to support efficient machine code generation, including fine-grained control over dynamic and static behaviors. Describes the Open Dylan implementation of the Dylan language, a core set of Dylan libraries, and a library interchange mechanism. The core libraries provide many language extensions, a threads interface, and object finalization, printing and output formatting modules, a streams module, a sockets module, and modules providing an interface to operating system features such as the file system, time and date information, the host machine environment, as well as a foreign function interface and some low-level access to the Microsoft Win32 API.Starting Price: Free -
8
Tcl
Tcl
Tcl is a very simple programming language. If you have programmed before, you can learn enough to write interesting Tcl programs within a few hours. This page provides a quick overview of the main features of Tcl. After reading this you'll probably be able to start writing simple Tcl scripts on your own; however, we recommend that you consult one of the many available Tcl books for more complete information. Each Tcl command consists of one or more words separated by spaces. In this example there are four words: expr, 20, +, and 10. The first word is the name of a command and the other words are arguments to that command. All Tcl commands consist of words, but different commands treat their arguments differently. The expr command treats all of its arguments together as an arithmetic expression, computes the result of that expression, and returns the result as a string. In the expr command the division into words isn't significant.Starting Price: Free -
9
F#
F#
F# gives you simplicity and succinctness like Python with correctness, robustness and performance beyond C# or Java. F# is open source, cross-platform and free to use with professional tooling. F# is a JavaScript and .NET language for web, cloud, data-science, apps and more. Cloud computing relies on leveraging multiple integrated services. Using multiple services required a unique set of technologies and capabilities, and F# excels in this domain. With the recent rise of cloud solutions, it is becoming increasingly easy to deploy multiple services “in the cloud”, expanding what is possible both by storing large amounts of data and running heavy computations distributed across clusters of machines.Starting Price: Free -
10
Nim
Nim
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.Starting Price: Free -
11
Eclipse Ceylon
Eclipse Ceylon
Eclipse Ceylon is a language for writing large programs in teams. To learn more, read the 15 minute quick intro, before taking the tour of the language. The best way to try it out is to download the IDE and write some code. Then you can explore the modules in Ceylon Herd. Or you can try it online. This is a community project. Everything we produce is open source and all our work happens out in the open on GitHub and GitHub. Eclipse Ceylon's powerful flow-sensitive static type system catches many bugs while letting you express more, more easily: union and intersection types, tuples, function types, mixin inheritance, enumerated types, and reified generics. We spend more time reading other people's code than writing our own. Therefore, Eclipse Ceylon prioritizes readability, via a highly regular syntax, support for treelike structures, and elegant syntax sugar where appropriate.Starting Price: Free -
12
Less
Less
Less (which stands for Leaner Style Sheets) is a backwards-compatible language extension for CSS. This is the official documentation for Less, the language and Less.js, the JavaScript tool that converts your Less styles to CSS styles. Because Less looks just like CSS, learning it is a breeze. Less only makes a few convenient additions to the CSS language, which is one of the reasons it can be learned so quickly. Mixins are a way of including ("mixing in") a bunch of properties from one rule-set into another rule-set. Less gives you the ability to use nesting instead of, or in combination with cascading.Starting Price: Free -
13
Markdown
Markdown
Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML. See the Syntax page for details pertaining to Markdown’s formatting syntax. You can try it out, right now, using the online Dingus. The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.Starting Price: Free -
14
LaTeX
LaTeX
LaTeX, which is pronounced «Lah-tech» or «Lay-tech» (to rhyme with «blech» or «Bertolt Brecht»), is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is most often used for medium-to-large technical or scientific documents but it can be used for almost any form of publishing. LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right content. To produce this in most typesetting or word-processing systems, the author would have to decide what layout to use, so would select (say) 18pt Times Roman for the title, 12pt Times Italic for the name, and so on. This has two results: authors wasting their time with designs; and a lot of badly designed documents! LaTeX is based on the idea that it is better to leave document design to document designers, and to let authors get on with writing documents.Starting Price: Free -
15
Elixir
Elixir
Elixir is a dynamic, functional language for building scalable and maintainable applications. Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. Elixir is successfully used in web development, embedded software, data ingestion, and multimedia processing, across a wide range of industries. Check our getting started guide and our learning page to begin your journey with Elixir. All Elixir code runs inside lightweight threads of execution (called processes) that are isolated and exchange information via messages. Due to their lightweight nature, it is not uncommon to have hundreds of thousands of processes running concurrently in the same machine. Isolation allows processes to be garbage collected independently, reducing system-wide pauses, and using all machine resources as efficiently as possible (vertical scaling). Processes are also able to communicate with other processes running on different machines in the same network.Starting Price: Free -
16
Emojicode
Emojicode
Emojicode is an open-source, full-blown programming language, consisting of emojis. As a multi-paradigm language, Emojicode features object orientation, optionals, generics, closures, and protocols. Emojicode compiles native machine code using lots of optimizations that make your code fast. Emojicode comes with a comprehensive set of default packages. And you can easily write your own. We believe that Emojis have expressive force. Let’s use that to make programming more fun and accessible. Emojicode is a straightforward language to learn, whatever background you have. Our documentation is known to be excellent and stuffed with walk-through guides and examples. You can help Emojicode grow! Development takes place on GitHub and you’re invited to drop in. Before you install Emojicode make sure you have a C++ compiler and linker installed. clang++ or g++ is fine, for instance. The Emojicode compiler can only link binaries if such a compiler is available.Starting Price: Free -
17
Forth
Forth
Forth, the computer language was created for programming embedded and real-time applications. Today, it is available for developing applications on Windows, DOS, and variants of Unix that include macOS. Additionally, commercial-grade Forth cross-compilers generate highly optimized code that runs on a variety of microprocessors and microcontrollers and proves themselves very capable in custom-hardware environments. Forth is a high-level programming language, although most versions include an assembler. Fourth-system providers often include software tools to help application code make good use of system resources. Forth is interactive. It is conducive to developing modular, well-tested code in shorter development times. It can also result in very concise code. Some programmers are not accustomed to languages with such brevity, directness, and (apparent) simplicity. Forth has a reputation for rapid development, lean code, and superb performance.Starting Price: $399 one-time payment -
18
Deno
Deno
Deno is a simple, modern and secure runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly that uses V8 and is built in Rust. Deno comes with a manual which contains more in depth explanations about the more complex functions of the runtime, an introduction to the concepts that Deno is built on, details about the internals of Deno, how to embed Deno in your own application and how to extend Deno using Rust plugins. Next to the Deno runtime, Deno also provides a list of audited standard modules that are reviewed by the Deno maintainers and are guaranteed to work with a specific Deno version. These live in the denoland/deno_std repository.Starting Price: Free -
19
QML
Qt
QML is a declarative language that allows user interfaces to be described in terms of their visual components and how they interact and relate with one another. It is a highly readable language that was designed to enable components to be interconnected in a dynamic manner, and it allows components to be easily reused and customized within a user interface. Using the QtQuick module, designers and developers can easily build fluid animated user interfaces in QML, and have the option of connecting these user interfaces to any back-end C++ libraries. QML is a user interface specification and programming language. It allows developers and designers alike to create highly performant, fluidly animated and visually appealing applications. QML offers a highly readable, declarative, JSON-like syntax with support for imperative JavaScript expressions combined with dynamic property bindings.Starting Price: Free -
20
SystemC
SystemC
Your online reference for everything related to SystemC, the language for system-level design, high-level synthesis, modeling and verification. SystemC™ addresses the need for a system design and verification language that spans hardware and software. It is a language built in standard C++ by extending the language with the use of class libraries. The language is particularly suited to model system's partitioning, to evaluate and verify the assignment of blocks to either hardware or software implementations, and to architect and measure the interactions between and among functional blocks. Leading companies in the intellectual property (IP), electronic design automation (EDA), semiconductor, electronic systems, and embedded software industries currently use SystemC for architectural exploration, to deliver high-performance hardware blocks at various levels of abstraction and to develop virtual platforms for hardware/software co-design.Starting Price: Free -
21
V Programming Language
V Programming Language
Simple, fast, safe, and compiled. For developing maintainable software. Simple language for building maintainable programs. You can learn the entire language by going through the documentation over a weekend, and in most cases, there's only one way to do something. This results in simple, readable, and maintainable code. This results in simple, readable, and maintainable code. Despite being simple, V gives a lot of power to the developer and can be used in pretty much every field, including systems programming, webdev, gamedev, GUI, mobile, science, embedded, tooling, etc. V is very similar to Go. If you know Go, you already know 80% of V. Bounds checking, No undefined values, no variable shadowing, immutable variables by default, immutable structs by default, option/result and mandatory error checks, sum types, generics, and immutable function args by default, mutable args have to be marked on call.Starting Price: Free -
22
GameMaker Language (GML)
YoYo Games
The GameMaker Language (also called simply GML) is the proprietary GameMaker scripting language. This language is structured to permit users to create their games in an intuitive and flexible way while offering all the power of any other major programming language. It is also the basis for GML Visual and can be used in conjunction with that if required. Each event has its own tab in the editor and you can add, edit, or remove code from them at any time (for more information on events see Object Events). The code itself must have a basic structure and can contain resource indices, variables, functions, expressions, keywords, etc. all of which are explained in the sections below. If you are a novice to programming or making the switch from GML Visual, it is recommended that you start with the page on basic code structure and then read through all the other pages in this section, testing code from each one within GameMaker itself.Starting Price: Free -
23
Pine Script
TradingView
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.Starting Price: Free -
24
ZenScript
CraftTweaker
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.Starting Price: Free -
25
AMPL
AMPL
AMPL is a powerful and intuitive modeling language designed to represent and solve complex optimization problems. It enables users to formulate mathematical models in a syntax that closely mirrors algebraic notation, facilitating a clear and concise representation of variables, objectives, and constraints. AMPL supports a wide range of problem types, including linear programming, nonlinear programming, mixed-integer programming, and more. One of its key strengths is the ability to separate models and data, allowing for flexibility and scalability in handling large-scale problems. The platform offers seamless integration with numerous solvers, both commercial and open-source, providing users with the flexibility to choose the most appropriate solver for their specific needs. AMPL is available across multiple operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux, and offers various licensing options.Starting Price: $3,000 per year -
26
Wasp
Wasp, Inc.
Wasp is a full-stack web application framework that allows developers to build apps faster with less boilerplate code. It integrates React for frontend development, Node.js for backend, and Prisma for database management, enabling developers to focus on the essential parts of their app. The framework’s declarative syntax and simplified configuration mean that developers can describe their app's high-level structure in a .wasp file, and the system automatically handles much of the repetitive work, including routing, authentication, and API management. Wasp's goal is to simplify app development without sacrificing flexibility, making it ideal for building MVPs and production-ready applications.Starting Price: Free -
27
NoSQL
NoSQL
NoSQL is a domain-specific programming language used for accessing, managing, and manipulating non-tabular databases. A NoSQL (originally referring to "non-SQL" or "non-relational") database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that is modeled in means other than the tabular relations used in relational databases. Such databases have existed since the late 1960s, but the name "NoSQL" was only coined in the early 21st century, triggered by the needs of Web 2.0 companies. NoSQL databases are increasingly used in big data and real-time web applications.NoSQL systems are also sometimes called Not only SQL to emphasize that they may support SQL-like query languages or sit alongside SQL databases in polyglot-persistent architectures. Many NoSQL stores compromise consistency (in the sense of the CAP theorem) in favor of availability, partition tolerance, and speed. Barriers to the greater adoption of NoSQL stores include the use of low-level query languages. -
28
C#
Microsoft
C# (also known as C Sharp, pronounced "See Sharp") is a modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# enables developers to build many types of secure and robust applications that run in .NET. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers. This tour provides an overview of the major components of the language in C# 8 and earlier. C# is an object-oriented, component-oriented programming language. C# provides language constructs to directly support these concepts, making C# a natural language in which to create and use software components. Since its origin, C# has added features to support new workloads and emerging software design practices. At its core, C# is an object-oriented language. You define types and their behavior.Starting Price: Free -
29
C++/CLI
Microsoft
In Visual Studio 2022, the default target framework for .NET Core projects is 6.0. For .NET Frameworks projects, the default is 4.7.2. The .NET Framework version selector is on the configure your new project page of the create a new project dialog. C++/CLI itself isn't installed by default when you install a Visual Studio C++ workload. To install the component after Visual Studio is installed, open the Visual Studio Installer by selecting the Windows Start menu and searching for visual studio installer. Choose the modify button next to your installed version of Visual Studio. Select the Individual components tab. Scroll down to the compilers, build tools, and runtimes section, and select C++/CLI support for v143 build tools (Latest). Select modify to download the necessary files and update Visual Studio. By using C++/CLI you can create C++ programs that use .NET classes as well as native C++ types. C++/CLI is intended for use in console applications.Starting Price: Free -
30
Clojure
Clojure
Clojure is a robust, practical, and fast programming language with a set of useful features that together form a simple, coherent, and powerful tool. Clojure is a dynamic, general-purpose programming language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language, yet remains completely dynamic, every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When a mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system.Starting Price: Free