21–30 of 218 posts
Rust still allows imperative programming whereas Haskell doesn't. This makes a big difference. Rust is closer to Alan Turing than it is to Alonzo Church.
The code in this other post about implementing string distance metrics is also quite imperative: https://markkarpov.com/post/migrating-text-metrics.html
Rust still allows imperative programming whereas Haskell doesn't. This makes a big difference. Rust is closer to Alan Turing than it is to Alonzo Church.
Something that I found about going from Haskell to Rust was that Rust provides many powerful abstractions without compromising on performance. It was very frustrating to try reasoning about performance in Haskell due to its laziness. Every language has quirks about how to write performant code, but Haskell is notorious in my mind for being quite easy to write obscenely slow code in.
This is a very overstated concern, in my opinion. Based on my experience, once you learn the common gotchas (lazy folds, WHNF, etc.) it's rarely an issue. Real-world programs (web servers, databases, etc.) typically end up using frameworks that deal with strictness concerns for you anyway. For maybe the first couple weeks I was learning Haskell, this was a source of confusion, but I don't seem to run into it anymore.…
Computer Language Benchmarks of GHC versus C don't seem to be close to matching your 80% as fast claim [1]. Also, the 10% of the effort of hand-optimized C bit - seem to recall there was a caveat - "if you happen to Don Stewart" [2].
The following is just my vague, uninformed impression, but Haskell and Go seem to be opposite ends of a spectrum, with Rust somewhere in between:
Haskell: good for expert individuals and small teams. The language is highly sophisticated and the compiler is rather slow. At heart, it's a research language, so the direction might not always suit production use. If you contract out to a Haskell development shop, who do you turn to with your Haskell code-base if things don't work out?
Go: designed by Google for their use-case - large teams of commodity programmers. It's very quick to onboard programmers - they can be productive and non-dangerous quickly. The language is very simple and the compiler is very quick - which is again good for scaling large teams.
[1] https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?la...
[2] https://donsbot.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/write-haskell-as-fa...
> More advanced type systems, however, allow to specify the generic constraints explicitly. Well, Java allows it, even if it looks a bit unglier than the Rust example. > T min (T a, T b) { if (a.compareTo(b) > 0) { return b; } else { return a; } } And even without general availability of concepts (already in gcc 6.x), one can achieve it in C++ via if constrexpr .
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Comparing it against Rust doesn't really seem fair. If I wasn't using Haskell, I'd be writing Erlang, and last I checked GHC is much faster than Erlang/OTP. Certainly faster than CPython, Ruby, and most Node.js. Trying to compete with Rust or C++ performance in Haskell is certainly frustrating to reason about :)
While "GHC is faster than CPython" is a fairly accurate generalization, I still think python performance is easier to reason about. Haskell can give you fast code, but sometimes it will be super slow for no obvious reason.
Haskell/GHC will soon have an extension for linear types, which will bring the languages much closer: http://blog.tweag.io/posts/2017-03-13-linear-types.html
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This is a very overstated concern, in my opinion. Based on my experience, once you learn the common gotchas (lazy folds, WHNF, etc.) it's rarely an issue. Real-world programs (web servers, databases, etc.) typically end up using frameworks that deal with strictness concerns for you anyway. For maybe the first couple weeks I was learning Haskell, this was a source of confusion, but I don't seem to run into it anymore.…
> .. you can write vastly more complicated programs that are, say, 80% as fast as hand-optimized C for only 10% of the effort of hand-optimized C. Computer Language Benchmarks of GHC versus C don't seem to be close to matching your 80% as fast claim [1]. Also, the 10% of the effort of hand-optimized C bit - seem to recall there was a caveat - "if you happen to Don Stewart" [2]. The following is just my vague, uninfor…
Your comparison between Haskell and Go is about market size, not language design. I suspect you would have a similarly hard time finding Rust devs as Haskell devs (i.e. mildly less convenient than a popular language like Python or Go).
The similarities are striking. Both have a problem with undocumented or experimental modules for everyday tasks, both use compiler plugins to make sure that every package is using its own superset of the language (although in Rust this only applies to nightly), both tout lofty goals while rarely producing production grade systems. Rust is the first toe dip into the world of blog posts heralding the"coming of the age…