Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
circ ular wrote: What are the advantages/disadvantages when comparing OCaml to Haskell? The biggest disadvantage of comparing Ocaml to Haskell would have to be causing a long, pointless flamewar. Offhand, I can't think of an upside. Brian ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
On Wednesday 13 August 2008 13:48:45 circ ular wrote: > What are the advantages/disadvantages when comparing OCaml to Haskell? Techically, predictable performance, high performance on x64, tools like camlp4 and language features including records, functors, polymorphic variants and structurally-typed objects are probably the main advantages of OCaml over Haskell. Non-technically, OCaml has more well-tested libraries, more practical books (e.g. my own), more high-profile open source projects (e.g. FFTW has millions of users): http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2007/12/top-10-most-popular-ocaml-programs.html http://haskell-news.blogspot.com/2008/01/top-10-most-popular-haskell-programs.html and is much more widely used in industry. There are far more practically-minded people in the OCaml community and that is reflected in the much larger number of commercial products that use OCaml. Tangentially, OCaml has a successful relative in F# whereas Haskell's close relatives are extinct. I did extensive research on all of the most popular functional languages last year, including Haskell. In case you are trying to do something similar, I'll warn you that almost all of the examples of Haskell's use in industry are fakes, e.g. companies that have no products, companies that have one product that never used Haskell, companies that happen to have two Haskell advocates working for them out of 150 developers, companies where one employee once did a preliminary Haskell program but nothing since and, finally, plain old spam where companies that have never had anything to do with Haskell have hijacked the Haskell site to advertise on-line only to be hailed as a "real world" example of Haskell in industry by its proponents. I was rather baffled when I discovered this and have never seen behaviour like it. Haskell also has some advantages over OCaml, of course, but you should probably ask the Haskell community to explain them. I consider them all to be untested because nobody has ever done anything significant using Haskell AFAIK. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
--- On Wed, 8/13/08, Jon Harrop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I consider them all to be untested because nobody has ever done anything > significant using Haskell AFAIK. Besides the window manager I'm currently using... :-P ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
David Thomas wrote: > --- On Wed, 8/13/08, Jon Harrop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I consider them all to be untested because nobody has ever done anything > > significant using Haskell AFAIK. > > > Besides the window manager I'm currently using... :-P And Darcs the distributed revision control system. Erik -- - Erik de Castro Lopo - "Do I do everything in C++ and teach a course in advanced swearing?" -- David Beazley at IPC8, on choosing a language for teaching ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
> And Darcs the distributed revision control system. Erik, Darcs is so slow, buggy and broken by design (I speak for direct experience) that even the GHC team decided to switch to GIT or Mercurial, see [1] and [2]. Consider this: three years ago I decided to study a functional language and I had to decide between OCaml and Haskell. In that period, for other reasons, I was searching for a new SCM to replace CVS and I extensively tested Darcs. Darcs was so broken that I decided for OCaml when I realized it was written in Haskell. So Darcs, IMHO, is definitively not "anything significant". [1] http://www.reddit.com/comments/6v2nl/ghc_project_switches_to_git/ [2] https://lopsa.org/node/1656 -- Ing. Paolo Donadeo Studio Associato 4Sigma Website: http://www.4sigma.it Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ ~ :wq ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
So it seems the debate went on anyway. I had written something, but when just before posting i saw Brian Hurt's post, and decided not to. It now seems i was wrong, and actually (when reading the others) my post seems quite balanced after all. I'm not saying that the other posters are biased in any way. But i have the point of view of someone trying to learn a language "for fun" and in order to discover interesting features or novel point of views. It seems Haskell do much better in that context that in the "use it to do something useful in the cruel world" context used so far. So here is my original post : I'm afraid your question is a bit too general (and it seems strange to ask that on the mailing-list of one of the projects, while asking for a balanced answer). The main differences are : OCaml is impure (imperative features in the language), Haskell is pure. OCaml is strict, Haskell is lazy. Ocaml has modules, Haskell has type classes. If you're coming from the imperative land, OCaml is, in my opinion, easier to learn. It is also a good choice to begin with OCaml because everything you learn with the OCaml basics can be reused for learning Haskell (the converse is also true, but then you have to learn lazy evaluation first, wich is a non-trivial shift, and is vastly less used in OCaml). Haskell is certainly worth the effort, but my personal opinion is that learning OCaml first is a good idea. Moreover, for "real world" application, you may prefer OCaml over Haskell. The syntax are different, but not so much (before learning haskell, i could generally understand the purpose of tiny haskell sources). I have heard some people say they prefer the Haskell syntax, but this is more a matter of taste (and not very relevant if you want to learn something from the language semantics). Both have their ugly sides. Idiomatic OCaml implementations tend to produce more efficient than Idiomatic Haskell implementations (but Haskell compilers are getting better and better everyday (for Haskell performances to be good, compilers have to do lots of clever and not so simple optimizations), and Haskell is faster than most (scripting) languages used these days anyway). The Haskell standard library is bigger than the Ocaml one, but this is probably not an advantage for beginners (because this means more time spent in browsing the doc, while playing with the language and reimplementing functions yourself is much more interesting). Haskell program thus tends to be more terse and "higher-level" (because of reusing a lot of higher-order combinators in the stdlib): OCaml is also very expressive, but the simplicity of the stdlib tends to keep people on simpler things. To the advanced programmer, both languages have interesting advanced features to offer. Haskell tends to specialize in sophisticated type system features, whereas OCaml has an interesting object system, and polymorphic variants. Both languages have very interesting derivatives, specific languages intended to explore a specific area (concurrency, metaprogramming, etc...). Camlp4 is a flexible and powerful Ocaml preprocessor. Haskell has some tools in that direction, that i have never used (so i'm mostly guessing here), but they seem to be even less supported and used inside the community. ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
On Thursday 14 August 2008 03:46:10 David Thomas wrote: > --- On Wed, 8/13/08, Jon Harrop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I consider them all to be untested because nobody has ever done anything > > significant using Haskell AFAIK. > > Besides the window manager I'm currently using... :-P Interestingly, the number of registered installs of XMonad has increased a lot from only 95 in January to 542 now. However, that is still orders of magnitude fewer than the most popular open source software written in OCaml: Debian and Ubuntu registered installs - 184,574: FFTW (14,298 lines of OCaml) 12,866: Unison (23,993 lines of OCaml) 7,286: MLDonkey (171,332 lines of OCaml) 4,365: Darcs (3,939 lines of Haskell) 4,066: FreeTennis (7,419 lines of OCaml) 4,057: Planets (3,296 lines of OCaml) 3,465: HPodder (2,225 lines of Haskell) 2,965: LEdit (2,048 lines of OCaml) 2,822: Hevea (11,596 lines of OCaml) 2,657: Polygen (1,331 lines of OCaml) So: . 8/10 of the top ten most popular OCaml/Haskell open source projects on Debian and Ubuntu were written in OCaml and not Haskell. . 221,293 installs of popular OCaml software compared to only 7,830 of Haskell. . 235,312 lines of well-tested OCaml code compared to only 6,164 lines of well-tested Haskell code. Some of the Haskell projects (e.g. pugs and srcinst) have even *decreased* in popularity over the past 7 months. Indeed, Darcs was only being used to a significant extent by the Haskell community and the GHC developers are now giving up on it themselves citing awful performance as one of the main reasons: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DarcsEvaluation Note their own benchmark results: Annotate: Darcs is 50x slower than Git. Clone: Darcs is 49x slower than Git. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
Thanks - nice summary Dave M. On 14/08/2008, blue storm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So it seems the debate went on anyway. I had written something, but when > just before posting i saw Brian Hurt's post, and decided not to. It now > seems i was wrong, and actually (when reading the others) my post seems > quite balanced after all. > > I'm not saying that the other posters are biased in any way. But i have the > point of view of someone trying to learn a language "for fun" and in order > to discover interesting features or novel point of views. It seems Haskell > do much better in that context that in the "use it to do something useful in > the cruel world" context used so far. > > So here is my original post : > > I'm afraid your question is a bit too general (and it seems strange to ask > that on the mailing-list of one of the projects, while asking for a balanced > answer). > > The main differences are : > OCaml is impure (imperative features in the language), Haskell is pure. > OCaml is strict, Haskell is lazy. > Ocaml has modules, Haskell has type classes. > > If you're coming from the imperative land, OCaml is, in my opinion, easier > to learn. > It is also a good choice to begin with OCaml because everything you learn > with the OCaml basics can be reused for learning Haskell (the converse is > also true, but then you have to learn lazy evaluation first, wich is a > non-trivial shift, and is vastly less used in OCaml). > Haskell is certainly worth the effort, but my personal opinion is that > learning OCaml first is a good idea. Moreover, for "real world" application, > you may prefer OCaml over Haskell. > > The syntax are different, but not so much (before learning haskell, i could > generally understand the purpose of tiny haskell sources). I have heard some > people say they prefer the Haskell syntax, but this is more a matter of > taste (and not very relevant if you want to learn something from the > language semantics). Both have their ugly sides. > > Idiomatic OCaml implementations tend to produce more efficient than > Idiomatic Haskell implementations (but Haskell compilers are getting better > and better everyday (for Haskell performances to be good, compilers have to > do lots of clever and not so simple optimizations), and Haskell is faster > than most (scripting) languages used these days anyway). > > The Haskell standard library is bigger than the Ocaml one, but this is > probably not an advantage for beginners (because this means more time spent > in browsing the doc, while playing with the language and reimplementing > functions yourself is much more interesting). Haskell program thus tends to > be more terse and "higher-level" (because of reusing a lot of higher-order > combinators in the stdlib): OCaml is also very expressive, but the > simplicity of the stdlib tends to keep people on simpler things. > > To the advanced programmer, both languages have interesting advanced > features to offer. Haskell tends to specialize in sophisticated type system > features, whereas OCaml has an interesting object system, and polymorphic > variants. Both languages have very interesting derivatives, specific > languages intended to explore a specific area (concurrency, metaprogramming, > etc...). > > Camlp4 is a flexible and powerful Ocaml preprocessor. Haskell has some tools > in that direction, that i have never used (so i'm mostly guessing here), but > they seem to be even less supported and used inside the community. > > ___ > Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: > http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list > Archives: http://caml.inria.fr > Beginner's list: > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners > Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs > > ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
Well said Brian. Any tutorial is good enough at underlining respective language features. Haskell has lazy evaluation, Caml has strict evaluation, don't pretend it's a secret and don't ask whether good or bad. Be responsible, try it yourself if needed, then choose yourself. - damien > circ ular wrote: > > > What are the advantages/disadvantages when comparing OCaml to Haskell? > > > The biggest disadvantage of comparing Ocaml to Haskell would have to be > causing a long, pointless flamewar. Offhand, I can't think of an upside. > > Brian ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Thursday 14 August 2008 07:50:43 am blue storm wrote: > The main differences are : > OCaml is impure (imperative features in the language), Haskell is pure. > OCaml is strict, Haskell is lazy. > Ocaml has modules, Haskell has type classes. I would restate the last as: OCaml has an object system, Haskell has type classes. In Haskell you can write a function that takes anything that is "showable" (a type class) and print it out. The sig would be something like (I'm mixing OCaml and Haskell syntax here, but hopefully the point is still clear): Showable 'a => 'a -> unit You can't quite do that with modules/functors. However with objects you can write a function that takes a showable and executes it. It's sig would look like this: showable -> unit where class type showable = object method print : unit -> unit ... end As to Haskell vs. OCaml, they are both great languages. Haskell is more researchy and experimental (although with Haskell Prime they are making a big push to make it more friendly to industrial uses). This is great because you get some really cool stuff. This is also bad because all the cool stuff is hard to understand and sometimes you-just-want-to-get-stuff-done. OCaml is great for that and for one other thing that I think few people point out. OCaml supports a variety of programming styles: OO, imperative and functional. This means it's easy for anyone to pick up and use. If you have collaborators, OCaml projects have an easier learning curve. Anyone can feel more or less at home using OCaml in a week. In contrast, Haskell has quite a steep initial learning curve (eg. you need to learn monads before you can write any interesting real-world application) which can be a big barrier to potential collaborators. Also the ability to switch styles often lets you write faster. For some problems, I just think in one style versus another. It just comes more easily to me in a functional style sometimes, and an OO style other times. OCaml let's you write however you think about it. Haskell makes you think about it in *the haskell* way. Sometimes this is good because it forces you to do certain things. Othertimes it just gets in your way. Peng -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFIpDMIfIRcEFL/JewRAtN1AKCth4Iep/uNUaFObIcyvAQXS0LmwgCdHQB2 wP8iIzC8YUtOlxmuPPfSKqU= =g/dJ -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
On Thursday 14 August 2008 12:50:43 blue storm wrote: > It is also a good choice to begin with OCaml because everything you learn > with the OCaml basics can be reused for learning Haskell (the converse is > also true, but then you have to learn lazy evaluation first, wich is a > non-trivial shift, and is vastly less used in OCaml). Monads and zippers? > The syntax are different, but not so much (before learning haskell, i could > generally understand the purpose of tiny haskell sources). I have heard > some people say they prefer the Haskell syntax, but this is more a matter > of taste (and not very relevant if you want to learn something from the > language semantics). Both have their ugly sides. That reminds me: you can run the same OCaml code in the top-level, in the bytecode interpreter and through the native code compiler. > Idiomatic OCaml implementations tend to produce more efficient than > Idiomatic Haskell implementations (but Haskell compilers are getting better > and better everyday (for Haskell performances to be good, compilers have to > do lots of clever and not so simple optimizations), Even if Haskell's performance is improved it will remain unpredictable and, consequently, it will continue to be impossible to optimize non-trivial Haskell programs. > and Haskell is faster than most (scripting) languages used these days > anyway). Despite being written in Python, Mercurial is orders of magnitude faster than Darcs. > The Haskell standard library is bigger than the Ocaml one, Does the Haskell stdlib provide a database interface, md5 checksums, marshalling, pretty printing, lexer generator, graphics library, regular expressions, unix interface and weak references? > Haskell program thus tends to > be more terse and "higher-level" (because of reusing a lot of higher-order > combinators in the stdlib): OCaml is also very expressive, but the > simplicity of the stdlib tends to keep people on simpler things. I'm not sure what you mean by "simplicity of the [OCaml] stdlib tends to keep people on simpler things" but there is certainly far more non-trivial software written in OCaml than Haskell, both open source and commercial. > Camlp4 is a flexible and powerful Ocaml preprocessor... And an extensible general-purpose parser generator that is higher-level than Parsec. Camlp4 rocks! -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Thursday 14 August 2008 09:28:34 am Peng Zang wrote: > OCaml let's you write however you think about it. Haskell makes you think > about it in *the haskell* way. Sometimes this is good because it forces > you to do certain things. Othertimes it just gets in your way. > > > Peng Haha, I have some free time. So, let me explain more about why sometimes it's good that Haskell makes you do things in a certain way. One is that Haskell forces your program into two parts. Parts that contain side-effects (in monads) and the part that is pure. This is great because the compiler can now do some optimizations not available when you don't know if your code is pure. This is also good because side-effects can be confusing and difficult to maintain over time. By putting all the side effects in a box, you can compartmentalize it away. For lots of changes you only have to consider the pure stuff which is easier to think about (no worries about state, no worries about the right order of doing things, program in a declarative fashion). The downside is you have to put all the side-effect stuff in a corner and box it off. This can be a little odd because it may make you organize your code in a counterintuitive way. Also it makes side-effect creep very obvious (when you realize "oops, that needs to be in a monad too... and that... and that ... crap"). You really have to sit down and think about the design before you do anything. Haskell is definitely a first-on-paper, then-in-code type of language. This can be good because for complex stuff you probably want to think about the design ahead of time anyways. Haskell forces this discpline on you. On the other hand, if you like to do rapid prototyping type of approach and live on the edge a bit, it can be a bummer. A similar argument follows for lazy (non-strict) evaluation as well. Allows some really cool stuff (eg. infinite lists) and optimizations (eg. deforestation). But has significant overhead (eg. you have to make a thunk for everything, if you're going to evaluate it anyways, all that work to make the thunk is wasted) and it's hard to reason about speed and memory performance (eg. it looks like a tail recursive function that uses constant stack space but because the accumulator is thunked, you end up creating O(N) thunks). Anyways, I think Haskell has some really cool ideas and I like it. It definitely expands the mind. But OCaml is my go-to-swiss-army-knife of languages. It used to be C but that was too low level for me and library support was crap (this was before Boost). Then it was Java but it was waay to verbose and you couldn't even return a tuple without creating a class for it first. Then it was Lisp, but it's dynamically typed and I got tired of finding bugs from 3 years ago. Now days it's OCaml. Maybe one day it'll be something else, but in the mean time, I'm enjoying it. Peng -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFIpDq+fIRcEFL/JewRAv3eAJ9L3W43Qfn2bFpLpUiyRt4Dn1dt6gCeNvew 8w6kCN5AKcGJH8WYzJPyKVM= =6HsO -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Thursday 14 August 2008 09:57:47 am Jon Harrop wrote: > Monads and zippers? They can be useful for the same reasons they are in Haskell. You can always write OCaml code like Haskell code, it's just not always easiest to do it that way. > Even if Haskell's performance is improved it will remain unpredictable and, > consequently, it will continue to be impossible to optimize non-trivial > Haskell programs. That's true, but I think Haskell's point of view is to stop that completely. They want to remove optimization of code and put it into the hands of the compiler. The ideal is to say to the programmer: "don't worry about performance and optimization, just write correct code. The compiler will figure out the rest". Clearly we're not at that point, and perhaps that ideal is a long ways to become true if possible at all. But you gotta give them props for the idea. It would be nice to only care about correctness and not performance. Peng -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFIpDvifIRcEFL/JewRAvCyAJwNdNYMEx8TKWwwDB1D6X3C5258uwCghlP3 ZaogvTv/CydHsPQ+ETA/+KI= =eQDx -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 02:57:47PM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote: > > and Haskell is faster than most (scripting) languages used these days > > anyway). > > Despite being written in Python, Mercurial is orders of magnitude faster than > Darcs. (wow, very funny) by the same stupid thinking process: Despite being written in C, CVS is orders of magnitude slower than mercurial. obviously now, python is faster than C. -- Vincent ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
On Thursday 14 August 2008 15:21:40 you wrote: > On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 02:57:47PM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote: > > > and Haskell is faster than most (scripting) languages used these days > > > anyway). > > > > Despite being written in Python, Mercurial is orders of magnitude faster > > than Darcs. > > (wow, very funny) > > by the same stupid thinking process: > > Despite being written in C, CVS is orders of magnitude slower than > mercurial. Is that based upon any measurements? -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
Jon Harrop wrote: > 184,574: FFTW (14,298 lines of OCaml) For FFTW, Ocaml is used the generate C code. Nothing that the final user of libfftw links to is written in Ocaml. I don't think this one really counts. > Some of the Haskell projects (e.g. pugs and srcinst) have even *decreased* > in popularity over the past 7 months. Indeed, Darcs was only being used to a > significant extent by the Haskell community and the GHC developers are now > giving up on it themselves citing awful performance as one of the main > reasons: > > http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DarcsEvaluation Darcs with its theory of patches is also far more experimental and is pushing back the boundaries of how people who write revision control software think about the field. Erik -- - Erik de Castro Lopo - "Incompetence, like misery, seeks company." -- Erik Naggum ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
Excerpts from Jon Harrop's message of Thu Aug 14 15:57:47 +0200 2008: > On Thursday 14 August 2008 12:50:43 blue storm wrote: ... > > and Haskell is faster than most (scripting) languages used these days > > anyway). > > Despite being written in Python, Mercurial is orders of magnitude faster than > Darcs. The difference of performances between Darcs and Mercurial is 99% due differences in algorithms not in the implementation language. So this comparison does not make sense! -- Nicolas Pouillard aka Ertai signature.asc Description: PGP signature ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
On Thursday 14 August 2008 21:57:59 you wrote: > Excerpts from Jon Harrop's message of Thu Aug 14 15:57:47 +0200 2008: > > On Thursday 14 August 2008 12:50:43 blue storm wrote: > > > and Haskell is faster than most (scripting) languages used these days > > > anyway). > > > > Despite being written in Python, Mercurial is orders of magnitude faster > > than Darcs. > > The difference of performances between Darcs and Mercurial is 99% due > differences in algorithms not in the implementation language. So this > comparison does not make sense! Only if the choice of algorithm was independent of the language, which is rarely the case. For example, Fortran programmers use arrays when they are unsuitable and their programs can be slower than scripting languages as a consequence. That is Fortran's fault. Does the Darcs implementation overuse singly linked lists because they are more accessible? Are the reported stack overflows indicative of this? I don't know but I certainly wouldn't rule it out as a possibility. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
Excerpts from Jon Harrop's message of Thu Aug 14 23:16:26 +0200 2008: > On Thursday 14 August 2008 21:57:59 you wrote: > > Excerpts from Jon Harrop's message of Thu Aug 14 15:57:47 +0200 2008: > > > On Thursday 14 August 2008 12:50:43 blue storm wrote: > > > > and Haskell is faster than most (scripting) languages used these days > > > > anyway). > > > > > > Despite being written in Python, Mercurial is orders of magnitude faster > > > than Darcs. > > > > The difference of performances between Darcs and Mercurial is 99% due > > differences in algorithms not in the implementation language. So this > > comparison does not make sense! > > Only if the choice of algorithm was independent of the language, which is > rarely the case. > > For example, Fortran programmers use arrays when they are unsuitable and > their > programs can be slower than scripting languages as a consequence. That is > Fortran's fault. > > Does the Darcs implementation overuse singly linked lists because they are > more accessible? Are the reported stack overflows indicative of this? I don't > know but I certainly wouldn't rule it out as a possibility. I'm talking about the informal algorithms, their independent of that kind of things... -- Nicolas Pouillard aka Ertai signature.asc Description: PGP signature ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
On Thursday 14 August 2008 22:50:19 you wrote: > I'm talking about the informal algorithms, their independent of that kind > of things... Yes, that may well be true. I think we would need in-depth knowledge of Darcs to be able to distinguish between the two. Do any OCaml projects use Darcs, BTW? -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
Jon Harrop wrote: > Do any OCaml projects use Darcs, BTW? Ocsigen¹ does. ¹ http://ocsigen.org/ -- Stéphane Glondu ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
> One is that Haskell forces your program into two parts. Parts that contain > side-effects (in monads) and the part that is pure. You can actually do quite a bit more, using different monads to compartementalize different aspects of your code. You will, by the way, have noticed that Haskellers tend to put everything in the IO monad (when a separate monad would make more sense) because mixing monads is difficult. > This is great because > the compiler can now do some optimizations not available when you don't know > if your code is pure. I suppose you could get the same benefits with a "purity inference" compiler pass, the same way haskell compilers a "strictness inference". > it makes side-effect creep very obvious (when you realize "oops, that needs > to be in a monad too... and that... and that ... crap"). unsafePerformIO to the rescue ! I generally agree with the interest of pure programming in some part of the language. It is, however, not all as rosy as you say (i've seen people argue that the "side-effect creep" related to monads cause composability problems) because they are hard issue (monads mixing for example) wich have not been quite resolved yet. Haskell is interesting because of that experimental taste, but i totally agree it "sometimes gets in your way". > A similar argument follows for lazy (non-strict) evaluation as well. Allows > some really cool stuff (eg. infinite lists) and optimizations (eg. > deforestation). Explicit lazy evaluation (as in OCaml) can give you the same cool stuff, with a saner standard (strict evaluation) and, in my opinion, increased comprehensibility (by explicitely highlighting the part that rely on lazy evaluation). Both library and syntaxic support of lazy values in OCaml could be better that they are now, but they is work going on (we even have *several* lazy lists librairies these day). > That's true, but I think Haskell's point of view is to stop that completely. > They want to remove optimization of code and put it into the hands of the > compiler. The ideal is to say to the programmer: "don't worry about > performance and optimization, just write correct code. The compiler will > figure out the rest". I strongly disagree on that point. You just can't rely on anything that optimizes "as much as possible" when you don't know precisely what it does. The idea to "not worry about performance" is, in my opinion, wrong because you'll always have specific cases wich are not correctly optimized (see for example the posts on the performance of high-level automatic differentiation stuff that went on the Haskell planet a month ago or so). The usual programmer should not need to know about subtle and implementation-specific stuff (whereas the requirement of understanding tail-recursion is commonly accepted among OCaml programmers), but trying to optimize every naive code into something efficient is a dangerous dream. ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Jon Harrop wrote: > On Thursday 14 August 2008 22:50:19 you wrote: >> I'm talking about the informal algorithms, their independent of that kind >> of things... > > Yes, that may well be true. I think we would need in-depth knowledge of Darcs > to be able to distinguish between the two. > > Do any OCaml projects use Darcs, BTW? We use Darcs as the VCS for Marionnet. See http://darcs.marionnet.org . Darcs 2 has yet to give us any headache; the "exponential merge" corner cases of version 1 are apparently gone, and now it's quite a pleasure to use. - -- Luca Saiu http://www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~saiu GNU epsilon: http://www.gnu.org/software/epsilon Marionnet: http://www.marionnet.org -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkineB4ACgkQvzOavibF0oYvqQCeMXMygLIy46MFhFJqmOU8n6qJ kDwAn3xb+Ezu6Ky/cdZPgKFLNM/0bVBN =rOZh -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 FWIW, I still use darcs (darcs 2) exclusively. So far, no other version control system has gotten the relationships among repositories, branching, and merging quite right, although I'm keeping a keen eye on Mercurial's forthcoming "rebase" extension. On Aug 14, 2008, at 5:15 PM, Jon Harrop wrote: On Thursday 14 August 2008 22:50:19 you wrote: I'm talking about the informal algorithms, their independent of that kind of things... Yes, that may well be true. I think we would need in-depth knowledge of Darcs to be able to distinguish between the two. Do any OCaml projects use Darcs, BTW? -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) iEYEARECAAYFAkiqMqsACgkQIVlHUIJ6Q02suQCgim9bDlna3r0WYl8Qb2DHQDuy zgEAn1VRvTKhaKIphvp++BJJb3cyASph =Mq8B -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
circ ular wrote: What are the advantages/disadvantages when comparing OCaml to Haskell? What are the advantages/disadvantages when comparing a fork to a spoon? -- best regards, Thomas Fischbacher [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
What are the advantages/disadvantages when comparing a fork to a spoon? From Church's thesis, one can easily answer this question: they are equivalent. The reduction is quite easy. A fork can be reduced to a spoon using a fire, an anvil and a hammer, and a spoon can be reduced to a fork using a saw. Hope this helps. -- Romain Bardou ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
I'm not sure there's confluence if you factor in the resources required for such reduction, though. On Thu, 2008-08-21 at 10:47 +0200, DooMeeR wrote: > > What are the advantages/disadvantages when comparing a fork to a spoon? > > From Church's thesis, one can easily answer this question: they are > equivalent. > > The reduction is quite easy. A fork can be reduced to a spoon using a > fire, an anvil and a hammer, and a spoon can be reduced to a fork using > a saw. > > Hope this helps. > -- David Teller-Rajchenbach Security of Distributed Systems http://www.univ-orleans.fr/lifo/Members/David.Teller Angry researcher: French Universities need reforms, but the LRU act brings liquidations. ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml
DooMeeR wrote: What are the advantages/disadvantages when comparing a fork to a spoon? From Church's thesis, one can easily answer this question: they are equivalent. The reduction is quite easy. A fork can be reduced to a spoon using a fire, an anvil and a hammer, and a spoon can be reduced to a fork using a saw. So, why at all bother with OCaml if it's equivalent to Basic anyway, or machine language, for that matter? Church's Thesis is often cited for precisely this purpose of cutting off discussions related to differing aspects of programming languages -- sometimes this may even seem a Pawlowian reflex reaction. However, I think Church is a red herring here, as the important aspects of programming languages are not at the language:machine interface, but at the human:language interface. The design of a milk carton certainly does not matter a lot for how well it manages to store milk -- pretty much all of them do that quite well. But it certainly does matter for the question whether I'll spill milk all over the table when I try to put some into my tea (as I did this morning). -- best regards, Thomas Fischbacher [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs