The road to OCaml 5.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#31

Post by SquishyPanda23 » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

short_sells_poo wrote: post #2

I run a hedge fund. On any given day I hear a large number of complaints from the technologists that complex python systems are difficult to look after and we should use something else instead. There's some Rust being used, but there's little chance to get a quant to use Rust to do research because research is an exploratory process and the last thing one wants is a language that requires a lot of thought about lifet…

Some of the Python FFI tools are listed here: https://ocamlverse.github.io/content/ffi.html. But clicking through to GitHub, the repos haven't been updated in a while.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#32

Post by nv-vn » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

mtoner23 wrote: post #30

nv-vn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a terribly misinformed take. If you throw enough resources at Python then sure, you can probably get adequate throughput . The problem is that in finance a lot of problems require you to think about latency , which is a total non-starter for Python

If it were a total non starter than why would their entire company be using it?

Sounds like they're already using Rust where performance matters and are looking to switch

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#33

Post by rkangel » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 2:24 PM UTC

short_sells_poo wrote: post #2

I run a hedge fund. On any given day I hear a large number of complaints from the technologists that complex python systems are difficult to look after and we should use something else instead. There's some Rust being used, but there's little chance to get a quant to use Rust to do research because research is an exploratory process and the last thing one wants is a language that requires a lot of thought about lifet…

I think Elixir would be interesting for your usecase.

It's a dynamic, garbage collected language. It's easy to pick up and get going with. As a functional programming language there isn't a lot to learn in the way of language constructs, and you don't even have to do the 'wrestling with the type system' thing that you have to do in compiled functional languages like OCaml or Haskell (like you do in Rust).

Its processing 'horsepower' is probably comparable to Python, but it's much better for building low latency things if you want to run something in a bit more of a production use case. This is also improving due to the recent addition of a JIT.

The addition of NX is making Elixir an increasingly interesting place to do ML - write Elixir, have it run on GPU etc. See https://dashbit.co/blog/nx-numerical-elixir-is-now-publicly-...

Python integration is probably best done using the Erlang 'port' system - running Python as a managed process and communicating with it using messages over stdin/stdout. I use it for C interop and it works well (and fits well with the Elixir/Erlang process model). It's not difficult to roll your own in Python e.g. https://github.com/fujimisakari/erlang-port-with-python/blob... or look at something like http://erlport.org/

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#34

Post by dunefox » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 2:25 PM UTC

awild wrote: post #24

pharmakom wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The larger problem in my view is that big Python systems tend to follow OOP design since functional programming patterns do not work well in Python. So you start with something minimal and simple inside a script or notebook, but quickly it evolves into something more like a Java code-base. Typing does help, agreed.

Java has good to great FP, making most objects immutable is also trivial. Mypy is good to get strict typing enforced but, but I still prefer the native and slightly wonky typesystem to a tacked on one that builds on trust.

> Java has good to great FP

Java does absolutely not have "good to great FP" support. It's an imperative and OO programming language that recently got lambdas, no more, no less.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#35

Post by dunefox » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 2:27 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #17

short_sells_poo wrote: post #2

I run a hedge fund. On any given day I hear a large number of complaints from the technologists that complex python systems are difficult to look after and we should use something else instead. There's some Rust being used, but there's little chance to get a quant to use Rust to do research because research is an exploratory process and the last thing one wants is a language that requires a lot of thought about lifet…

Have you looked into Julia, Nim, Clojure, or even Common Lisp? I'm not sure bout Python interop with CL, but Nim and Clojure seems to have some kind of beta-grade interop, and there's a solid interop story in Julia. And all of those languages have some of their own "native" data analysis and scientific computing toolkits (Julia having more than "some", of course). That said, complicated Python systems can be improved…

Julias interop with Python is excellent: https://github.com/JuliaPy/PyCall.jl (also with R, see RCall.jl). It's just not statically typed, so the original problem is not solved - albeit Julia being the better language for scientific purposes.

CL could also be great language-wise (https://digikar99.github.io/py4cl2/, https://github.com/snmsts/burgled-batteries3) but I don't know how good the interop is in reality since I haven't tried it.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#36

Post by upbeat_general » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 2:28 PM UTC

mtoner23 wrote: post #30

nv-vn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a terribly misinformed take. If you throw enough resources at Python then sure, you can probably get adequate throughput . The problem is that in finance a lot of problems require you to think about latency , which is a total non-starter for Python

If it were a total non starter than why would their entire company be using it?

Instagram has much lower latency requirements…

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#37

Post by philzook » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 2:34 PM UTC

short_sells_poo wrote: post #2

I run a hedge fund. On any given day I hear a large number of complaints from the technologists that complex python systems are difficult to look after and we should use something else instead. There's some Rust being used, but there's little chance to get a quant to use Rust to do research because research is an exploratory process and the last thing one wants is a language that requires a lot of thought about lifet…

There is an actively developed python to ocaml interop library for purposes quite similar to yours. I have seen demos where ocaml and python are used within the same jupyter notebook

https://signalsandthreads.com/python-ocaml-and-machine-learn...

https://github.com/thierry-martinez/pyml

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#38

Post by SquishyPanda23 » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

mtoner23 wrote: post #30

nv-vn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a terribly misinformed take. If you throw enough resources at Python then sure, you can probably get adequate throughput . The problem is that in finance a lot of problems require you to think about latency , which is a total non-starter for Python

If it were a total non starter than why would their entire company be using it?

It's not clear which company you're referring to, but

- Instagram was at one point a startup. It's common for startups to write in a scripting language to optimize for speed of adding features. Then if you grow or get acquired, the scripting language often eventually gets replaced by a language more optimized for maintenance cost, safety, and/or speed.

- Data scientists often only really know scripting languages, and at any rate scripting languages are useful for prototyping algorithms that need to change daily. Hence a lot of hedge funds use Python. For code that is stable and really matters for performance purposes, it's common for funds to use C/C++ or even FPGAs.

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#39

Post by pharmakom » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 2:39 PM UTC

dunefox wrote: post #34

awild wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java has good to great FP, making most objects immutable is also trivial. Mypy is good to get strict typing enforced but, but I still prefer the native and slightly wonky typesystem to a tacked on one that builds on trust.

> Java has good to great FP Java does absolutely not have "good to great FP" support. It's an imperative and OO programming language that recently got lambdas, no more, no less.

Yeah 100% - Java lacks many of the features required for serious FP and the ecosystem of libraries is heavily OOP too (although functional wrappers can usually be implemented).

Re: The road to OCaml 5.0

#40

Post by grumpyprole » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

cardanome wrote: post #29

I really hope to see more interest in OCaml in the future. It is probably one of the most underrated programming languages. The perfect marriage between state of the art functional programming and pragmatism. A great static and strong type system. Solid performance and an insanely fast compiler. Also compiles to JS if you need that. Multicore support will make it quite perfect. Only thing that is holding it back more…

If they can also ship algebraic effects (and even better, typed algebraic effects), then I think it will push the language back firmly into "state of the art". This will mean it continues to get the attention it deserves. I'm excited about algebraic effects, I think they are much more intuitive than monads (and don't require code to be rewritten).