Re: [Caml-list] Re: Why OCaml **cks

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

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