Oxidizing OCaml: Locality

Post by robocat » Sat, May 27, 2023, 11:12 PM UTC

hardwaregeek wrote: post #25

xixixao wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays my primary concern is readability and understandability. Thrown into a codebase, can I understand what's going on? OCaml (which at FB was used to write the Flow typechecker and Hack compiler afair) favored higher order functions. I enjoyed playing with these in my Haskel-based introduction course at university, and I even wrote a similar language that favored them. But I now heavily dislike if `a b c` means…

Yeah I think it’s kind of like how pg wrote about how using lisp gave him a disproportionate advantage. Sure, when people used fewer dependencies and the alternatives were C++, Python v1, and Perl, but these days a lot of languages have Lisp features and the cost of using a niche language is worse dependencies and tooling.

  The source code of the Viaweb editor was probably about 20-25% macros. Macros are harder to write than ordinary Lisp functions, and it's considered to be bad style to use them when they're not necessary. So every macro in that code is there because it has to be. What that means is that at least 20-25% of the code in this program is doing things that you can't easily do in any other language.

  if you were to compete with ITA and chose to write your software in C, they would be able to develop software twenty times faster than you [by using LISP].
  ITA's hackers seem to be unusually smart

Post by malkia » Sat, May 27, 2023, 11:24 PM UTC

saghm wrote: post #24

malkia wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain std::launder then - https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/launder - it's simple word, mostly used when talking about dirty money ;) - but hey - I've still no idea how/when/why to use it... ;)

Using simple words in confusing contexts also makes people feel smart. Essentially any way of being technically correct in confusing ways has this effect; "I'm so much smarter that you can't even understand _why_ I'm right" is too juicy a flex for some people to avoid.

Post by electroly » Sat, May 27, 2023, 11:38 PM UTC

lpw25 wrote: post #19

yafbum wrote: post #7

This is a great idea, but I have questions * Is there a process for upstreaming this into the mainline language, or is this essentially JaneStML now? * Why choose such an obscure word as `exclave` to indicate return-value optimization? How about `return local` or something similarly approachable?

Our long term aim is to upstream all of our work from our branch of the OCaml compiler. Of course, that is contingent on the ideas we’re developing there being accepted by the community. There are two main reasons we work on our own branch: 1. Language design is hard. At Jane Street we have a great opportunity to design new features, test them extensively in a realistic environment, and then change them. Because we h…

Post by [deleted] » Sun, May 28, 2023, 12:01 AM UTC

electroly wrote: post #45

lpw25 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our long term aim is to upstream all of our work from our branch of the OCaml compiler. Of course, that is contingent on the ideas we’re developing there being accepted by the community. There are two main reasons we work on our own branch: 1. Language design is hard. At Jane Street we have a great opportunity to design new features, test them extensively in a realistic environment, and then change them. Because we h…

This process seems to intentionally cut off upstream from having input into the design of the features during development when there's still a chance to change it. What happens when you implement something that you like, release it internally, but then it turns out upstream doesn't like it or wants it a different way? Will you maintain your feature on your fork forever (thus JaneStML), or will you abandon your featur…

Post by andrewstuart » Sun, May 28, 2023, 1:10 AM UTC