Re: [Caml-list] Re: Why OCaml sucks

["Ralph Douglass" <ralph@grayskies.net>]

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Not_found and Failure _ can be a bit annoying to watch for, so I suggest
using Core.  The default behavior for most functions is to return an option
instead of raising an exception.  There are _exn versions of the functions
if you want exceptions.

On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 5:45 AM, Vincent Hanquez <tab@snarc.org> wrote:

> On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 01:39:54AM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> >
> > Brian Hurt recently published the following blog post "Why OCaml sucks":
> >
> >   http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2008/05/07/why-ocaml-sucks/
> >
> > I think it is interesting to discuss which aspects of OCaml can be
> improved
> > upon and how but I disagree with some of his points. I'll address each of
> the
> > original points in turn:
>
> yeah, a new troll post (!)
>
> > 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, is not a good reason to impose their drawbacks
> on everybody else.
>
> > 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. again, ocaml is not about doing
> raytracer in opengl only.
>
> > 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).
> and having a Not_found crippling somewhere is just plain annoying.
>
> even having something like a List.Not_found/Hashtbl.Not_found would make
> thing a bit easier.
>
> > 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. using them as a fancy goto
> mechanism is just plain stupid and really bad programming style.
>
> > 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 ?
> haskell has improve its performance lately; not on everything, but still
> can beat ocaml on some micro benchmarks.
>
> > I have other wish-list items of my own to add:
> >
> > . No 16Mb limit.
>
> use 64 bits.
>
> --
> Vincent
>
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-- 
Ralph

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