In Haskell they're spectacularly useful. For example, implementing STM in about a weekend as opposed to never: http://blog.enfranchisedmind.com/2009/01/the-problem-with-stm-your-languages-still-suck/
I know STM doesn't necessarily play with the Rust memory model, just an example of an unexpected capability that emerged from having pure functions. On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 10:23 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxw...@gmail.com>wrote: > On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 10:08 AM, Max Cantor <i...@cantor.mx> wrote: > > I know this will be an unpopular opinion, but pure functions would be a > > massive win for Rust, especially if the eventual goal is high > performance, > > highly parallelizable (browser rendering engines..) development. > > Being able to annotate a function as side-effect free (e.g. via > __attribute__ ((pure)) in GCC) can yield some useful optimizations, > but I expect that LTO largely makes it unnecessary. The pure > attribute in GCC in C is not checked and can result in bugs, but I > think it's also not widely enough used in C that there is a lot of > practical experience with bugs resulting from the misuse. At times I > know I've wished the annotation were more widely used just because it > would make reasoning about third party code easier: "does foobar() > have non-trivial side effects???" > > I understand that D has checkable pure functions I'm not sure how > useful they've been there. I recall hearing that there were some > gnarly interactions with heap allocation. >
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