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Haskell's type system works because of purity, and purity doesn't generally mesh well with performance-oriented applications like game engines. There are some
by Kootle 8y ago
Haskell's type system works because of purity, and purity doesn't generally mesh well with performance-oriented applications like game engines. There are some type-driven approaches to gamedev, like https://github.com/jonascarpay/apecs https://github.com/jonascarpay/apecs, but it's fairly experimental. There has been some talk about linear types, which would allow Haskell to have controlled impurity similar to Rust, but they're still a ways off.
- wz1000 8y agoLinear types support is coming along nicely, there is a fork of GHC with a prototype implementation. https://github.com/tweag/ghc/tree/linear-types https://github.com/tweag/ghc/tree/linear-types However, to allow the compiler to optimise pure operations to impure ones, I don't think linear types are sufficient. You need something like uniqueness types.
- btcindivist 8y agoI think C++ compiles down to a pure functional language that is then optimized into an efficient beast. So I'm not sure that pure code is hard to optimize.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoSSA is quite different from a pure FP; for example it doesn’t do anything about effects, it only gets rid of local imperative assignments that don’t really interfere with purity anyways.
- tathougies 8y agoMost imperative languages have an intermediate language in which local variables are immutable. However, purity is about more than immutability. For example, in C++ x = doSomething(x) + 1 Can be written to not overwrite x int x2 = doSomething(x) + 1 This is equivalent in some ways to Haskell let x' = doSomething x + 1 However, I know that in Haskell, evaluating 'doSomething x' will not turn off the computer, display anything to the user, or launch missiles. I have no idea what evaluating 'doSomething(x)' does in C++. It may add things to caches, exit the program, etc.