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Scala Native

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Re: Scala Native

#241

Post by needusername »

emeryberger wrote: post #237
densh wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How's the managed runtime implemented (GC, memory model, etc.)? In a first release we're going to use Boehm GC. That's just a stepping stone, not a long-term strategy. Stay tuned for news on this front. > How did you get rid of JVM and JRE class library dependencies of Scala? We're reimplementing / porting from Apache Harmony all the things we need. > What's the debugging story? We're going to integrate with lldb.…

Hans Boehm's GC is actually really, really good. Before you embark on a massive engineering effort that will likely lead to little gain and a lot of pain, I would measure the overheads very carefully. I am not at all convinced precise GCs buy you that much over the Boehm GC for most apps, and they fundamentally kill interop with C code. (I can't recall for sure but I believe I had this conversation with Martin in a t…

Mono was a long time on Hans Boehm's GC and despite feeding it a lot of metadata never got satisfying results with it. Eventually they replaced it with a custom GC (SGen).

Re: Scala Native

#242

Post by Recurecur »

the_af wrote: post #23
dsabanin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, think of it as practical Haskell that you can actually use in your day to day work ;-)

Haskell is a practical language, and one usual impediment for using it in your day to day work is "we must use the JVM". What happens if you remove that requirement? :)

Haskell doesn't seem to be a very good language for doing hard or soft realtime, or simulation (realtime games, flight simulation, robotics, industrial control etc.). On the other hand, given appropriate memory management which looks to be in the works, native Scala seems a pretty good fit.

It seems to me Scala is potentially much more "general purpose" than Haskell. In other words, "more practical".

Re: Scala Native

#243

Post by duaneb »

hibikir wrote: post #34
the_af wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No-one denies Scala is a fine language, but I don't think that's a narrow view of it. It's actually a pretty good question. A lot of Scala's design is full of compromises made for Java inter-op. A huge motivation for using Scala is "I want a modern language which allows me to use all these existing Java libraries and tools". If you remove the ecosystem and the inter-op, what is there left for Scala? Why not use a bet…

Because all the other languages mentioned are better only from very specific perspectives. Scala's strength is precisely that it's a mutt: Want to write imperative code? Sure. Functional? No problem. How about a type system that far more featureful than Go? That works too. Scala gets a bad rap precisely because people are big fans of their own way of writing code, call it better, and think that anyone that wants some…

> Scala's strength is precisely that it's a mutt: Want to write imperative code? Sure. Functional? No problem. How about a type system that far more featureful than Go? That works too.

This also essentially describes C++. This is also why both languages can be so terrible to use: every library has its own dialect.

Re: Scala Native

#244

Post by densh »

airless_bar wrote: post #136
densh wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal is to be as "true" as possible by default with extra flags to trade some exact semantic aspects for performance. E.g. overflow semantics, bounds checks, null safety etc. Apart from the base language we'll also introduce some language/library extensions to make lower-level programming that is going to be limited Scala Native "dialect" of Scala. E.g. pointers, structs, stack allocation, extern objects etc.

Is there a difference between @extern and @native? I could have imagined that it would have been more compatible if Scala-JVM and Scala-Native used the same annotations (using JNI behind the scenes on the JVM).

@native implies JNI-style definition to be available along the Scala method definition. @extern lets you call straight to C code without any additional ceremony, all you need is a single forward declaration.

Re: Scala Native

#245

Post by duaneb »

airless_bar wrote: post #43
duaneb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue scala' main selling point is making the jvm palatable to people who hate Java. However, it's entirely unclear without the jvm why I would choose it over, say, rust, Haskell, go, c++, etc.

Scala is a pretty great language on its own. Have a look at the adoption of Scala.js. The ecosystem of Scala.js is larger than the "compile-to-js" ecosystems of "rust, Haskell, go, c++" combined. One of main strengths of Scala is that people get things done. It's the only language of the ones you mentioned which has reasonable support across three vastly different platforms.

Who actually uses Scala.js, though? It still seems firmly in the hobbyist camp.

> One of main strengths of Scala is that people get things done.

This is also true of rust, go, c++, and arguably haskell. I don't see anything about scala that inherently makes it easier to "get things done". If anything, I've spent a good 10% of my scala development time (over hundreds if not thousands of hours) debugging library, compiler, and documentation bugs and inconsistencies. This is not good for a language where you get things done.

Re: Scala Native

#246

Post by yashap »

bad_user wrote: post #166
the_af wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: I use Scala in my day job. I consider it better than Java, but worse than other languages. I definitely agree that all languages accumulate compromises and inelegant hacks as they evolve. It's unavoidable. That said, in my opinion Scala's blunders are many. You can find out about many of them from Paul Philips, ex committer of Scala, but if he sounds too bitter to you (he does to me; at this point he sounds lik…

- I've never experienced null problems in Scala. There's theory and there's practice. In practice if a NPE does happen, you treat it as a bug and wrap it. I don't experience problems, because Scala libraries are well behaved and for Java libraries I read the docs. - Being a "jack of all trades" means Scala has the superior module system. In Scala you can have abstract modules, the way you have in Ocaml. In Scala type…

Couldn't agree more with all of this. In practice NPEs are extremely rare in decent Scala code, and very easy to fix. The tooling is great, sbt has a slow startup time but is otherwise good, and I too love the mix of OOP and functional programming in Scala, they're really not at odds with one another.

Re: Scala Native

#247

Post by dang »

cbeustwatch wrote: post #202

Hello Cedric Beust, you really need to stay off Scala threads. When are you going to delete your hacker news account just like your reddit account. Do it for the sake of your own reputation. https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/454ahd/recent_dottys...

You can't attack someone like this on HN no matter how bad their contribution to programming language discussion on the internet.

If you think you see abuse here, do please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We promise to look into it. But single-purpose accounts, let alone ones targeting individuals, aren't allowed here, so we've banned this one.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11681233 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Scala Native

#248

Post by placeybordeaux »

lmm wrote: post #227
placeybordeaux wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Go: Go is utter shit that only survives due to the devs name-dropping "Google" every 5 minutes. Making blanket statements like that without any substantiation makes me want to just write off everything else you have said.

To my mind writing off Go is table stakes for having an interesting discussion about modern programming language choice - anyone who takes Go seriously is coming from a position so different from mine that it would take many pages (all of which would be rehashing of old discussions) to bridge the gap, and I honestly can't be bothered. While I would try not to be so rude about it, I think GP is right to dismiss the la…

Go is obviously pretty god awful when it comes to design when viewed strictly as a language. The language is mind numbingly boring and restrictive. The reason why people are interested in go (at least IMO) is because of stuff that isn't really about the language design. They are interested in the subsecond compile times out of the box. They are interested in one of the best standard libraries out there, a static binary that has subsecond start up times, a GC that doesn't require lots of tuning, a language spec so simple and a standard formatter so most code looks the same, etc.

The language it's self has no beauty and is not fun or interesting like scala. But I still love it and would totally base my company on it if I was planning on hiring thousands of developers and training them to use it. I would be scared of doing that with scala.

Re: Scala Native

#249

Post by bshanks »

bad_user wrote: post #166
the_af wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: I use Scala in my day job. I consider it better than Java, but worse than other languages. I definitely agree that all languages accumulate compromises and inelegant hacks as they evolve. It's unavoidable. That said, in my opinion Scala's blunders are many. You can find out about many of them from Paul Philips, ex committer of Scala, but if he sounds too bitter to you (he does to me; at this point he sounds lik…

- I've never experienced null problems in Scala. There's theory and there's practice. In practice if a NPE does happen, you treat it as a bug and wrap it. I don't experience problems, because Scala libraries are well behaved and for Java libraries I read the docs. - Being a "jack of all trades" means Scala has the superior module system. In Scala you can have abstract modules, the way you have in Ocaml. In Scala type…

I'm interested in exploring what makes a build tool good. What does SBT do right and what do the others you mentioned do wrong?

Re: Scala Native

#250

Post by bshanks »

the_af wrote: post #55
hibikir wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because all the other languages mentioned are better only from very specific perspectives. Scala's strength is precisely that it's a mutt: Want to write imperative code? Sure. Functional? No problem. How about a type system that far more featureful than Go? That works too. Scala gets a bad rap precisely because people are big fans of their own way of writing code, call it better, and think that anyone that wants some…

Note: I use Scala in my day job. I consider it better than Java, but worse than other languages. I definitely agree that all languages accumulate compromises and inelegant hacks as they evolve. It's unavoidable. That said, in my opinion Scala's blunders are many. You can find out about many of them from Paul Philips, ex committer of Scala, but if he sounds too bitter to you (he does to me; at this point he sounds lik…

I'm interested in exploring what makes a build tool bad or good. What do you dislike about SBT?
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