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OCaml as my primary language

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Re: OCaml as my primary language

#171

Post by gf000 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #79
garbthetill wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

doesnt rust still have the advantage of having no gc? I dont like writing rust, but the selling point of being able to write performative code with memory safety guarantees has always stuck with me

Considering how many applications are running in JS/Python execution speed or GC is a low concern for many programs. Ergonomics (community, compiler guarantees, distribution, memory pressure, talent availability, whatever) seem more meaningful.

I get your point, but JS is an order of magnitude faster than Python, they are not in the same league.

A lot of effort went into making it efficient thanks to the web, while python sorta has its hands tied back due to exposing internals that can be readily used from C.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#172

Post by gf000 »

inkyoto wrote: post #169
garbthetill wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

doesnt rust still have the advantage of having no gc? I dont like writing rust, but the selling point of being able to write performative code with memory safety guarantees has always stuck with me

OCaml was[0] very popular in the high-frequency trade programming, especially because of its high performance and predictable latency despite having a garbage collector, plus, of course, because of the correctness of the code written in it. OCaml's GC design is a pretty simple one: two heaps, one for short-lived objects and another one for the long-lived objects, and it is a generational and mostly non-moving design.…

At the same time, OCaml has a very simplistic memory layout where even integers are boxed - Java at least has primitive types.

That surely has a performance cost.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#174

Post by dmpk2k »

gf000 wrote: post #172
inkyoto wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OCaml was[0] very popular in the high-frequency trade programming, especially because of its high performance and predictable latency despite having a garbage collector, plus, of course, because of the correctness of the code written in it. OCaml's GC design is a pretty simple one: two heaps, one for short-lived objects and another one for the long-lived objects, and it is a generational and mostly non-moving design.…

At the same time, OCaml has a very simplistic memory layout where even integers are boxed - Java at least has primitive types. That surely has a performance cost.

Are you sure about boxed integers? Perhaps you mean floats? As far as I know Ocaml uses the typical integer/pointer divide.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#175

Post by [deleted] »

sureglymop wrote: post #111
hardwaregeek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t Kotlin be a more reasonable choice in that case? It has ADTs and a lot of the same niceties of Rust.

Yes. It can also be compiled to native. I just think it was held back too much by the java/jvm backwards compatibility but then again that's probably also the justification for its existence. I definitely find it (and jetpack compose) make developing android apps a much better experience than it used to be. What I like a lot about Kotlin are its well written documentation and the trailing lambdas feature. That is def…

[deleted]

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#176

Post by omcnoe »

noelwelsh wrote: post #33

I saw a talk by someone from Google about their experiences using Rust in the Android team. Two points stuck out: they migrated many projects from Python, so performance can't have been that much of a concern, and in their surveys the features people liked most were basics like pattern matching and ADTs. My conclusion is that for a lot of tasks the benefit from Rust came from ML cicra 1990, not lifetimes etc. I feel…

The issue regarding academia is that functional programming is treated as an afterthought/sideshow that is mainly of interest for research. Almost no-one is teaching FP concepts to undergrads.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#177

Post by swiftcoder »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #69
nine_k wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that Google strives to have a reasonably short list of languages approved for production-touching code. Rust can replace / complement C++, while OCaml cannot (it could replace Go instead... fat chance!). So I suspect that the team picked Rust because it was the only blessed language with ADTs, not because they won't like something with faster compile times. No way OCaml could have stolen the Rust's thunder: w…

Wouldn’t Kotlin be a more reasonable choice in that case? It has ADTs and a lot of the same niceties of Rust.

Potentially, but Kotlin is even more recent that Rust, and didn't get blessed internally at Google till somewhat later

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#178

Post by uncircle »

omcnoe wrote: post #176
noelwelsh wrote: post #33

I saw a talk by someone from Google about their experiences using Rust in the Android team. Two points stuck out: they migrated many projects from Python, so performance can't have been that much of a concern, and in their surveys the features people liked most were basics like pattern matching and ADTs. My conclusion is that for a lot of tasks the benefit from Rust came from ML cicra 1990, not lifetimes etc. I feel…

The issue regarding academia is that functional programming is treated as an afterthought/sideshow that is mainly of interest for research. Almost no-one is teaching FP concepts to undergrads.

Before 2010-something, the very popular meme in software engineering was that functional programming is really hard to understand, and really not suited for anything outside of academia. [1] Now that I've been programming in an immutable functional language for almost a decade (Elixir), I'm certain the meme was mostly born out of unfamiliarity [2] than actual complexity; it's really not that much different than imperative, just requires a different approach and understanding of the trade-offs. Writing a distributed system (say, a web app backend) in an imperative, mutable language in this day and age is increasingly a laughable proposition in my view. Use the right tool for the problem at hand.

Many academically-trained developers never got exposed to FP in school, and to this day you can still hear, albeit in much lesser numbers thanks to the popularity of Elixir/Clojure/etc., the meme of FP being "hard" perpetuated.

---

1: I would go so far as to blame Haskell for the misplaced belief that FP means overcomplicated type theory when all you want is a for loop and a mutable data-structure.

2: I played with OCaml 10+ years ago, and couldn't make head or tails of it. I tried again recently, and it just felt familiar and quite obvious.

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#179

Post by swiftcoder »

yodsanklai wrote: post #118
noelwelsh wrote: post #33

I saw a talk by someone from Google about their experiences using Rust in the Android team. Two points stuck out: they migrated many projects from Python, so performance can't have been that much of a concern, and in their surveys the features people liked most were basics like pattern matching and ADTs. My conclusion is that for a lot of tasks the benefit from Rust came from ML cicra 1990, not lifetimes etc. I feel…

> aesthetically the double semicolons are an abomination and irk me far more. I think they have been optional for like 20 years, except in the top-level interactive environment to force execution. That being said, I still don't get why people are so much upset with the syntax. You'll integrate it after a week writing OCaml code.

Erlang faces a similar uphill battle when it comes to syntax - there are three different punctuation marks used as terminators depending on context, and you have to keep in your head the rules for all 3. As someone who has written quite a bit of Erlang, but infrequently, it's always a battle.

And I think a big part of the reason that Elixir has done so well (Elixir pretty much starting out as Erlang-but-with-Ruby-syntax)

Re: OCaml as my primary language

#180

Post by pjmlp »

noelwelsh wrote: post #33

I saw a talk by someone from Google about their experiences using Rust in the Android team. Two points stuck out: they migrated many projects from Python, so performance can't have been that much of a concern, and in their surveys the features people liked most were basics like pattern matching and ADTs. My conclusion is that for a lot of tasks the benefit from Rust came from ML cicra 1990, not lifetimes etc. I feel…

That is why if I feel like doing ML style programing I rather reach out for Kotlin, Scala or F# than Rust, and even then Java and C# have gotten enough inspiration that I can also feel at home while using them.

I am no strage to ML type systems, my first one was Caml Light, OCaml was still known as Objective Caml, and Mirada was still something being discussed on programming language lectures on my university.

From what I see, I also kind of find the same, too many people rush out for Rust thinking that ML type systems is something new introduced by Rust, without having the background where all comes from.

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