From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.3 (2006-06-01) on yquem.inria.fr X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.0 required=5.0 tests=AWL autolearn=disabled version=3.1.3 X-Original-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Delivered-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Received: from mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.82]) by yquem.inria.fr (Postfix) with ESMTP id 78C4FBBCA for ; Fri, 9 May 2008 12:29:20 +0200 (CEST) X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AroCAJvEI0jUnw6Eb2dsb2JhbACCMY9WAQwFAgQHE5hx X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.27,460,1204498800"; d="scan'208";a="12030539" Received: from pih-relay05.plus.net ([212.159.14.132]) by mail1-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 09 May 2008 12:29:16 +0200 Received: from [80.229.56.224] (helo=beast.local) by pih-relay05.plus.net with esmtp (Exim) id 1JuPqZ-0003Xg-TM; Fri, 09 May 2008 11:29:04 +0100 From: Jon Harrop Organization: Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. To: Vincent Hanquez Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Re: Why OCaml **cks Date: Fri, 9 May 2008 11:23:50 +0100 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.9 References: <200805090139.54870.jon@ffconsultancy.com> <20080509094516.GA12893@snarc.org> In-Reply-To: <20080509094516.GA12893@snarc.org> Cc: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200805091123.51264.jon@ffconsultancy.com> X-Plusnet-Relay: 9833d4670df2b6d03d6e0f0d1754144c X-Spam: no; 0.00; ocaml:01 0100,:01 parallelism:01 parallelism:01 ocaml's:01 advocates:01 extensively:01 ocaml:01 haskell:01 haskell:01 turf:98 cave:98 frog:98 imho:01 wrote:01 On Friday 09 May 2008 10:45:16 you wrote: > On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 01:39:54AM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote: > > 1. Lack of Parallelism: Yes, this is already a complete show stopper. > > no it's not. it's in your fantasy world. lots of applications doesn't > (or marginally) benefits from parallelism, and that your specific turf > would benefit from them, That's just crazy talk. Nobody can afford to ignore the multicore era that we have been in for some time now. > is not a good reason to impose their drawbacks on everybody else. What drawbacks? > > 5. Strings: pushing unicode throughout a general purpose language is a > > mistake, IMHO. This is why languages like Java and C# are so slow. > > unicode string should not be the default string, but unicode string need > to be available as a first class citizen. Agreed. > > 7. Not_found: I like this, and Exit and Invalid_argument. Brian's point > > that the name of this exception does not convey its source is fallacious: > > that's what exception traces are for. > > exception traces are *not* available in long running program (daemon). Because you compiled it wrongly or because you lost the output? > > 8. Exceptions: I love OCaml's extremely fast exception handling (6x > > faster than C++, 30x faster than Java and 600x faster than C#/F#!). I > > hate the "exceptions are for exceptional circumstances" line promoted by > > the advocates of any language implementation with cripplingly-slow > > exception handlers. > > exceptions are for exceptional circumstances. Bah, nonsense. Exceptions are used extensively for non-exceptional circumstances in idiomatic OCaml and it works beautifully. > > 9. Deforestation: Brian says "Haskell has introduced a very interesting > > and (to my knowledge) unique layer of optimization, called > > deforrestation". True, of course, but useless theoretical piffle because > > we know that Haskell is slow in practice and prohibitively difficult to > > optimize to-boot. Deforesting is really easy to do by hand. > > have you been hiding in a cave lately? With yo mamma. > haskell has improve its performance lately; not on everything, but still > can beat ocaml on some micro benchmarks. Look at the objective and quantitative results using the latest GHC on a modern machine. Haskell can't even touch OCaml, let alone F#. ;-) > > I have other wish-list items of my own to add: > > > > . No 16Mb limit. > > use 64 bits. You aren't customer facing are you? -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e