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Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

thume.ca

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Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#11

Post by jpittis »

> I think the smaller differences are also large enough to rule out extraordinary claims, like the ones I’ve read that say writing a compiler in Haskell takes less than half the code of C++ by virtue of the language

Specifically the "by virtue of the language" part:

Seems to me like it's unreasonable to claim the languages are on equal footing because fancy parser libraries aren't allowed to be used for the project. The fancy parser libraries exist for certain languages specifically because the languages enable them to be written. (For example in Haskell: monadic libaries, libraries that take advantage of GADTs, etc.)

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#12

Post by trishume »

jpittis wrote: post #11

> I think the smaller differences are also large enough to rule out extraordinary claims, like the ones I’ve read that say writing a compiler in Haskell takes less than half the code of C++ by virtue of the language Specifically the "by virtue of the language" part: Seems to me like it's unreasonable to claim the languages are on equal footing because fancy parser libraries aren't allowed to be used for the project.…

I don't think monadic parser libraries have a real claim to be that difference. All the languages listed have excellent parsing libraries that make things similarly easy, if not by language power than by grammar DSL with embeddable code snippets.

I think if any library could make a real difference for Haskell it's most likely to be http://hackage.haskell.org/package/lens, which a Haskeller friend of mine claims could likely make a lot of the AST traversal and rewriting much terser.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#13

Post by boyter »

trishume wrote: post #8
boyter wrote: post #7

I really wish when counting code that people would use one of the more modern code counters, or at least use cloc. Tokei, loc, scc, polyglot, loccount or gocloc give a much better idea over wc because they account for comments and blank lines and in the case of scc and tokei strings. I had a similar experience in university. Class had to implement a modified Turing machine. We could use whatever language we wanted. O…

A few groups did give me output from a modern line counter, often Tokei or loc. I mention in the post that the ratios between source lines, word count lines and bytes were pretty similar across all projects. If people want to get a sense of how that compares to their intuitions in source lines they can use the ratio from our Rust project to convert. I ended up using raw lines for comparison because for relative measu…

Ah! I assumed you had access to the code. That makes more sense.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#16

Post by sonnyblarney »

"Their project was 17,211 raw lines, 15k source lines, and 637kb"

So a couple of students cranked out 15K lines of code, in basically a subset of their study time, for a single class?

I don't doubt they did it, what I doubt is the quality of what they wrote. Because it's 'just a project' it doesn't have to be fully debugged ...

But that is a vast amount of code to hand-write over a short period of time.

At that level, I think it's basically just 'code like the wind' with not much consideration for whether it works, architecture etc. etc. - which in a way might put the conclusions of the 'mini study' at odds.

At 15K LOC dashed out very quickly ... these are not products, they're comparing 'rapidly written out lines of code', which is something else entirely from working code.

Also, given that everyone is in Uni, and likely may not have been exposed to proper idiomatic code for the language ... this presents another issue. Ideally we'd want to compare reasonably idiomatic code for one language, to another.

Kudos to the author for this, but we should be aware of some caveats.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#17

Post by trishume »

trimbo wrote: post #15

Where's the code? I scanned this article a few times and can't find a link to it.

None of it is open source because it was done for a school course that uses the same project every term. The only use for having access to the code would be cheating on that project. The school gets mad when people publish the source for their school projects, especially when it isn't otherwise useful, that's also why my ray tracer isn't open source.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#18

Post by chimpburger »

ufmace wrote: post #9

I haven't made it through the whole thing yet, but I do want to register a vote in favor of using Lines Of Code count as a rough measure of program complexity. I think it's a perfectly valid things to do, provided that it isn't used as an evaluation metric and nobody is gaming it, and everyone is a reasonably good programmer, not doing crazy things like trying to stuff a massive algorithm onto one line to be clever,…

When comparing different languages it becomes more of a measure of the relative abstraction levels of languages. The exact same program will have hundreds (or thousands) of times more LOC in Assembly than in Python.

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#19

Post by akhilcacharya »

Loved this part and thought it was hysterical -

> Since my team had all interned at Jane Street the other language we considered using was OCaml, we decided on Rust but I was curious about how OCaml might have turned out so I talked to someone else I knew had interned at Jane Street and they indeed did their compiler in OCaml with two other former Jane Street interns.

Relatedly this is why I get annoyed at people that don’t believe 10x or Nx developers exist - they absolutely do!

Re: Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml

#20

Post by dudul »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #19

Loved this part and thought it was hysterical - > Since my team had all interned at Jane Street the other language we considered using was OCaml, we decided on Rust but I was curious about how OCaml might have turned out so I talked to someone else I knew had interned at Jane Street and they indeed did their compiler in OCaml with two other former Jane Street interns. Relatedly this is why I get annoyed at people tha…

Can you expand a little? I fail to see the connection between the quote and your conclusion.
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