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Rust as a gateway drug to Haskell

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Re: Rust as a gateway drug to Haskell

#2

Post by slaymaker1907 »

Something that I found about going from Haskell to Rust was that Rust provides many powerful abstractions without compromising on performance. It was very frustrating to try reasoning about performance in Haskell due to its laziness. Every language has quirks about how to write performant code, but Haskell is notorious in my mind for being quite easy to write obscenely slow code in.

Re: Rust as a gateway drug to Haskell

#4

Post by aaron-lebo »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #2

Something that I found about going from Haskell to Rust was that Rust provides many powerful abstractions without compromising on performance. It was very frustrating to try reasoning about performance in Haskell due to its laziness. Every language has quirks about how to write performant code, but Haskell is notorious in my mind for being quite easy to write obscenely slow code in.

This is what's really nice about Nim. It writes like Python, but is fast like Rust.

Ran across Option in it the other day, though it's not used heavily. I really wish there was something like Haskell but with a runtime like Nim or Go. Perhaps that is OCaml?

Re: Rust as a gateway drug to Haskell

#5

Post by delhanty »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #2

Something that I found about going from Haskell to Rust was that Rust provides many powerful abstractions without compromising on performance. It was very frustrating to try reasoning about performance in Haskell due to its laziness. Every language has quirks about how to write performant code, but Haskell is notorious in my mind for being quite easy to write obscenely slow code in.

>Every language has quirks about how to write performant code, but Haskell is notorious in my mind for being quite easy to write obscenely slow code in.

+1

One approach that occurred to me was to use Haskell and Hackage for prototyping a design and then a Rust implementation for production.

It also reminds me of this from several years ago: GHC honcho Simon-Peyton Jones saying the next Haskell will be strict, but still pure with effects only via monads. [1], [2].

Following on and presumably related to that PureScript is strict. [3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1924094

[2] http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/%7Egmh/appsem-slides/peytonjones.pp... (PowerPoint) Slide 40

[3] https://github.com/purescript/purescript/wiki/Differences-fr...

Re: Rust as a gateway drug to Haskell

#7

Post by pjmlp »

> More advanced type systems, however, allow to specify the generic constraints explicitly.

Well, Java allows it, even if it looks a bit unglier than the Rust example.

    > T min (T a, T b) {
        if (a.compareTo(b) > 0) { return b; } else { return a; }
    }
And even without general availability of concepts (already in gcc 6.x), one can achieve it in C++ via if constrexpr.

Re: Rust as a gateway drug to Haskell

#8

Post by oconnore »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #2

Something that I found about going from Haskell to Rust was that Rust provides many powerful abstractions without compromising on performance. It was very frustrating to try reasoning about performance in Haskell due to its laziness. Every language has quirks about how to write performant code, but Haskell is notorious in my mind for being quite easy to write obscenely slow code in.

Comparing it against Rust doesn't really seem fair. If I wasn't using Haskell, I'd be writing Erlang, and last I checked GHC is much faster than Erlang/OTP. Certainly faster than CPython, Ruby, and most Node.js.

Trying to compete with Rust or C++ performance in Haskell is certainly frustrating to reason about :)

Re: Rust as a gateway drug to Haskell

#9

Post by JoshTriplett »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #2

Something that I found about going from Haskell to Rust was that Rust provides many powerful abstractions without compromising on performance. It was very frustrating to try reasoning about performance in Haskell due to its laziness. Every language has quirks about how to write performant code, but Haskell is notorious in my mind for being quite easy to write obscenely slow code in.

I had the same experience: I really enjoyed the expressiveness and power of Haskell, as well as the strong type system. But Rust gives me all those things, as well as iterators for laziness when desired, without the pervasive laziness that had me constantly chasing down space leaks and adding strictness annotations.

Re: Rust as a gateway drug to Haskell

#10

Post by agumonkey »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #2

Something that I found about going from Haskell to Rust was that Rust provides many powerful abstractions without compromising on performance. It was very frustrating to try reasoning about performance in Haskell due to its laziness. Every language has quirks about how to write performant code, but Haskell is notorious in my mind for being quite easy to write obscenely slow code in.

Hence a reason why so many people are sticking to ML despite the lack of social momentum.
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