[Gllug] (no subject)

[Nix]

On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Pete Ryland uttered the following:
> On Fri, Nov 07, 2003 at 02:12:38PM +0000, Richard Jones wrote:
>> In particular if you're writing your programs in Objective CAML, you may
>> be able to *beat* C performance.
> 
> <troll>
> I've heard *so* many times someone say XYZ language is/can be faster than C,
> but yet it still makes me laugh. :-)
> </troll>

It tends to mean `is more optimizable than C'. C is a terribly hard
language to optimize (mostly because it's not rich enough to tell the
machine what you *really* want to do in a clear manner), and the best we
have is piles of heuristics. A proper language (like, well, OCaml, or
Haskell, or Curry, or even Common Lisp) doesn't have that problem; in
any of these the compiler can damned nearly rewrite your entire program
to use likely better implementations of every algorithm you suggested
than you could have written, and in the most extreme of them it can even
pick better algorithms for you.

Do *that* in C.

(Some languages, e.g. Cayenne, go even further, but Cayenne suffers from
the classic problem of research languages; docs written mostly in maths
and a single alpha-quality language implementation that requires
numerous also-research-quality language implementations before it'll
run...)

> Anyway, Bill's comments actually make me a little sad that Linux is all too
> often playing catch up

In the language community, *everyone* seems to be playing catch-up. The
language research community has all these amazing things, and nobody
*uses* them; no, they stick with things like Java and coo over amazing
stuff like generics (guys, they're a pathetic and partial implementation
of higher-order types, and the language research community had them
*decades* ago) or aspects (pretty much `likewise').

The most `advanced' languages in common use now seem to be scripting
languages! Perl and Python have both adopted a few useful techniques
from better languages (higher-order functions for instance), although
both of them are far from e.g. a proper typing scheme a-la Haskell.

-- 
`Me, I want exploding spaceships and pulverized worlds and clashes of
 billion-year-old empires *and* competently written sentences.'
                                                    --- Matt Austern

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug