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Felix - a fast scripting language

felix-lang.org

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31–40 of 88 posts

Re: Felix - a fast scripting language

#31

Post by egonschiele »

andrewflnr wrote: post #27
PuerkitoBio wrote: post #14

Looks very interesting, well done to whoever did this. After an admittedly quick and superficial glance at the tutorial, I'm not fan of chapter 6 though. Why so many ways to write calls? With no idiomatic syntax, it means I have to know all these variations if I hope to understand Felix code (since it is ok for anyone to choose whichever style).

I just don't understand why there are both gen and proc functions. Why have a separate kind of thing for functions that don't return anything?

Functions aren't supposed to have side effects and procs are. It makes sense since functions without side effects would allow for some nice compiler optimizations. The part that scares me is that the compiler doesn't enforce no side effects. This means you need to be extra careful when using someone else's code.

Re: Felix - a fast scripting language

#34

Post by dkersten »

haberman wrote: post #18

The web page rubs me the wrong way. How can you claim to be the fastest anything without a single benchmark? How can you claim to be a "scripting language" when you're statically-typed and compile to C++? What does "scripting language" even mean then? How can you say things like "it will be a bit slow the first time but subsequent runs will load much faster than any VM." Any VM? Are you really "much faster" than: $ t…

Indeed. In my experience, LuaJIT is insanely fast and is widely considered to be one of the fastest dynamic languages around. The term "scripting language" is, in my opinion, meaningless these days, but either way, claiming to be as faster than LuaJIT and aiming to be faster than C (while compiling to C++? [1]) and not demonstrating this to be true just seems pretentious.

[1] I guess it should be faster than hand-written C, which is, of course, possible. ATS supposedly generates C code which is very competitive.

Re: Felix - a fast scripting language

#35

Post by dkersten »

mrcharles wrote: post #12

I'll stick with Lua. I wouldn't give up the dynamic aspects of a language like Lua just for a bit more speed. LuaJIT is more than enough, and if you are doing the hard number crunching that makes speed an issue there's a good chance it's not trivially harder just to write it in C++ to begin with.

For raw number crunching, LuaJIT is plenty fast anyway (when you use the FFI to instantiate native types), so unless you need something real special (SSE perhaps), it may not even buy you that much to use C++ over LuaJIT.

Re: Felix - a fast scripting language

#36

Post by pekk »

Kiro wrote: post #29
TylerE wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not triviality - it's noise - Signal: Good - Noise: Bad, got it? If you REALLY need end of line markers, any half-way competent text editor can display them for you.

You obviously have no idea what signal-to-noise ratio is about if you think semicolons are noise. Who are you trying to impress?

End of line is already encoded in source files as \n. Redundancy isn't noise, but it is redundant.

Re: Felix - a fast scripting language

#37

Post by andrewflnr »

egonschiele wrote: post #31
andrewflnr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand why there are both gen and proc functions. Why have a separate kind of thing for functions that don't return anything?

Functions aren't supposed to have side effects and procs are. It makes sense since functions without side effects would allow for some nice compiler optimizations. The part that scares me is that the compiler doesn't enforce no side effects. This means you need to be extra careful when using someone else's code.

Yeah, I got that, but gen's and proc's both have side effects. Why?

Re: Felix - a fast scripting language

#38

Post by andrewflnr »

Kiro wrote: post #29
TylerE wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not triviality - it's noise - Signal: Good - Noise: Bad, got it? If you REALLY need end of line markers, any half-way competent text editor can display them for you.

You obviously have no idea what signal-to-noise ratio is about if you think semicolons are noise. Who are you trying to impress?

Semicolons are distracting, both reading and writing, and mostly useless. If it's not "noise" in a technical sense, is it not still a bad thing? I don't think this should be a complicated question.

Re: Felix - a fast scripting language

#39

Post by stcredzero »

Kiro wrote: post #29
TylerE wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not triviality - it's noise - Signal: Good - Noise: Bad, got it? If you REALLY need end of line markers, any half-way competent text editor can display them for you.

You obviously have no idea what signal-to-noise ratio is about if you think semicolons are noise. Who are you trying to impress?

It all depends on what you define as signal and what you define as noise.

Re: Felix - a fast scripting language

#40

Post by michaelfeathers »

While I enjoy reading about new and interesting languages (note: Felix has been around for over ten years), I really wish that language designers would put example code for something like FizzBuzz right on the front page to give people a flavor of the syntax.

I can't remember how many times in my life I've done a link expedition through a website or docs just to see a simple programming example.

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