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Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

roc-lang.org

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Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#2

Post by surprisetalk »

For those out of the loop, Roc was spearheaded by Richard Feldman, who made major contributions to Elm.

Feldman is such a charming guy! I highly recommend checking out his podcast Software Unscripted and watching his many talks on YouTube.

The recent SU episode with Brian Carroll talking about WASM in Roc was a great listen.

Roc also has an active community on zulip, so consider stopping by :)

[1] https://twitter.com/sw_unscripted

[2] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=richard+feldman

[3] https://www.roc-lang.org/community

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#5

Post by skitter »

Neat, looks like the website got an overhaul.

I like Roc's approach of detecting errors statically but still trying to let you run the code. If a snippet is work in progress and has an unused variable, Go or Zig will refuse to compile it. Yes, an unused variable indicates a problem, which is why it's not going to pass any sensible CI setup and make its way into production, but that doesn't mean I should be disallowed from checking whether what I've got so far works. Roc allows¹ running a program with type errors as long as you don't execute a code path affected by them, which I imagine is very useful for refactoring.

The platform approach is also interesting, but I don't know how it will play into code reuse. I guess the different io/platform interfaces might not be quite as big of a problem in a pure functional language? I'm not experienced enough to tell.

¹: I haven't checked how successful it is, given it's immaturity I expect there to be issues

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#6

Post by drannex »

No real thoughts on the language yet, other than looks interesting and modern.

But, that website has one of the smoothest on boarding experience I've ever seen for a new language. From the inline REPL (with built in tutorial), to the code definition section, its insanely practical. Every new (& old) language should have a website and onboarding experience like this one.

Re: Roc – A fast, friendly, functional language

#9

Post by yashrk »

If you are interested, «why yet another programming language?».

The unique selling point of Roc is clever optimization to convert purely functional source code to deep-imperative fast machine code, while keeping all the correctness of functional algorithms.

See this video of Richard Feldman for details — «Outperforming Imperative with Pure Functional Languages»: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzfy4EKwG_Y

Among those clever optimizations:

- static reference counting (no GC, like in Rust, but with no borrowing and borrow problems);

- stack allocation of the data with no external links;

- hidden («opportunistic») mutability even in the cases, where Haskell or Lisp will copy the value.

edit:markup

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