Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

Post by shawn_w » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 3:43 PM UTC

JonChesterfield wrote: post #54

Interesting things in here. #define _(e) ({e;}) //! I didn't know that corner of C. Removing the () from the macro does change what you can pass as e, and assigning the result of a block does work as one would expect. edit: -Wpedantic on gcc will tell me ISO C doesn't like the construct but it still compiles it happily. Clang offers -Wgnu-statement-expression-from-macro-expansion So it looks likely that this is the G…

Post by koolala » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 3:52 PM UTC

Chirono wrote: post #96

stefano wrote: post #61

Those are some very big claims with respect to performance. Has anyone outside of the author been able to reproduce the claims, considering you need to pay 100k/month just to do it? I also wonder if the commercial version has anti-benchmark clauses like some database vendors. I've always seen claims that K is much faster than anything else out there, but I've never seen an actual independent benchmark with numbers. E…

I used to use K professionally inside a hedge fund a few years back. Aside from the terrible user experience (if your code isn’t correct you will often just get ‘error’ or ‘not implemented’ with no further detail), if the performance really was as stellar as claimed, then there wouldn’t need to be a no benchmark clause in the license. It can be fast, if your data is in the right formats, but not crazy fast. And easy…

Post by koolala » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 3:54 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #134

For those who haven't heard of or aren't familiar with K, the Wikipedia page[1] has a remarkably helpful brief overview: > K is a proprietary array processing programming language developed by Arthur Whitney and commercialized by Kx Systems. The language serves as the foundation for kdb+, an in-memory, column-based database, and other related financial products. The language, originally developed in 1993, is a varian…

Post by koolala » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 3:56 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #56

kybernetikos wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard it said that it becomes easy to spot common patterns and structures in this style. Without knowing the idioms it's difficult to read but apparently once you know the idioms, you can scan it and understand it well.

It is for APL/k/j; you see patterns popping up in very dense code which does a lot, which does make it readable really once used to it. But most people never get to that point (or even ever look at APL of course).

Post by koolala » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 3:58 PM UTC

klibertp wrote: post #16

OMG, just yesterday I wrote a comment saying that I regret not learning K (I instead chose J) due to being too hung up on the notion of free software at the time... What a coincidence! Now I have no excuses anymore, time to learn K!