Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Criticizing Hare language approach for generic data structures

ayende.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 272 posts

Re: Criticizing Hare language approach for generic data structures

#21

Post by ddevault »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #20
ddevault wrote: post #13

Thanks for writing this up, though I feel that it may be a bit premature since at this point hardly anyone has any real experience writing Hare code. Regardless, I understand that this is a contentious design decision of Hare, so I would be happy to explain in it in more detail. We have discussed adding first-class maps to the language many times. We recognize the value in this feature and have tried to come up with…

> So far as hash collisions are concerned, these are very unlikely in this use-case. This is not a hash map where hash flooding is a concern, and accidental collisions are so unlikely as to be a negligible risk. The current compiler will silently ignore colliding hashes and (I believe) result in a very confusing error. The probability of this happening is not very large, but still not small enough that someone will h…

Checking the bucket entries based on their module identifier instead of (or in addition to) their key is a simple and obvious improvement to this code.

https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/hare/679

Re: Criticizing Hare language approach for generic data structures

#23

Post by rootlocus »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #7
guerrilla wrote: post #5

What's the problem? People will just use libraries. Why does it need to be part of the base language? Seems like that made C++ quite a mess in fact, while NPM-like ecosystems have done well.

> And the design of the Hare language doesn’t even allow me to provide that as a library. I have to fall down to code generation at best.

Here we go implementing Hare++!

Re: Criticizing Hare language approach for generic data structures

#24

Post by duped »

ddevault wrote: post #13

Thanks for writing this up, though I feel that it may be a bit premature since at this point hardly anyone has any real experience writing Hare code. Regardless, I understand that this is a contentious design decision of Hare, so I would be happy to explain in it in more detail. We have discussed adding first-class maps to the language many times. We recognize the value in this feature and have tried to come up with…

Why not support limited parametric polymorphism for things like equality and hashing? These are well studied problems, seems a bit convoluted to reject existing solutions.

Re: Criticizing Hare language approach for generic data structures

#25

Post by dathinab »

ddevault wrote: post #14
formerly_proven wrote: post #2

"Bring your own datastructures" is likely one of the C carry-overs for Hare. If you think about many "classic" C applications, a lot of them basically only exist around/for one or a few data structures (e.g. most servers, many utilities etc.). In that context BYODS is somewhat defensible: If you don't care to implement the data structure, why does your application exist in the first place? But that's not "modern" app…

Most application's bottlenecks are not their linked lists, and optimizing for anything other than your bottleneck is not the wisest use of your time. Performance is a budget, and I feel comfortable spending some of that budget on simplicity.

but maps are simpler to use (if appropriately provided by the language).

maps/sets are also fundamentally building blocks for a lot of algorthms and structures, not having them makes it WAY harder to implement them. actually potential impossible as performance can easily degrade to a point where it's unusable when you use O(n) (or worse) lookups instead of O(1) ones.

this is not a case of premature optimizations but of missing fundamental building blocks

and if you don't want genetics, ok, do it like go did initially make the map special language thingy.

Re: Criticizing Hare language approach for generic data structures

#27

Post by _trackno5 »

I don't get this guy. He's just raging.

I agree a hashmap is not simple and Hare's post is a bit naive, but I don't get what's his problem with the language not providing a default implementation. It's part of the language's design. It's targeting people that most likely won't need a hash table. It's not aiming to be a high-level batteries-included language like Java.

Re: Criticizing Hare language approach for generic data structures

#28

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

formerly_proven wrote: post #2

"Bring your own datastructures" is likely one of the C carry-overs for Hare. If you think about many "classic" C applications, a lot of them basically only exist around/for one or a few data structures (e.g. most servers, many utilities etc.). In that context BYODS is somewhat defensible: If you don't care to implement the data structure, why does your application exist in the first place? But that's not "modern" app…

BYOD combined with "we don't need a package manager" sounds like a particularly bad combination. I understand Rust's "small stdlib but great package ecosystem", but whats the appeal of "anemic stdlib plus no package ecosystem"?

Maybe I would come up with something like this if I only ever worked on Linux software using C, but outside those niches these choices seem weird.

Re: Criticizing Hare language approach for generic data structures

#29

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

_trackno5 wrote: post #27

I don't get this guy. He's just raging. I agree a hashmap is not simple and Hare's post is a bit naive, but I don't get what's his problem with the language not providing a default implementation. It's part of the language's design. It's targeting people that most likely won't need a hash table. It's not aiming to be a high-level batteries-included language like Java.

I've been doing some work in C for the first time in a long time.

I'm constantly going back to Java to try things out, just because of the absence of convenient data structures. It's a pain to keep recreating them unless it's necessary.

Re: Criticizing Hare language approach for generic data structures

#30

Post by hypeatei »

nynx wrote: post #17

It’s unfortunate that people are trying to revive a better version of the past, when the world has moved on and the past ultimately really wasn’t that great. C is a terrible language for building things in the modern world. Not including the progress over the last 4 decades in your new language is a mistake.

Agreed, I don't know how writing anything in C today would be considered a productive use of time besides low level / embedded work.
Post reply on HN