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How practical is Idris (or Idris 2) for real-world production programming right now? It seems to be a pretty natural evolution of Haskell with dependent types b
by nilkn 6y ago
How practical is Idris (or Idris 2) for real-world production programming right now? It seems to be a pretty natural evolution of Haskell with dependent types built in from the ground up instead of being sort of achievable with a patchwork of language extensions. Moreover, making laziness optional is a big deal for real-world industrial applications. (Note that even the author of this post indicates at the end significant difficulty with space leaks in the original Haskell compiler for Idris.)
Or, said differently, what's missing in the language or ecosystem to make it more immediately practical? Could Idris be the successor to Haskell with appropriate support?
- Legogris 6y agoMy experience is from 2015 but from a language-perspective the only things I personally saw lacking for prime-time use would be performance and the compiler/type-checker not always giving accurate error messages - but overall, nothing considerable when comparing to Haskell. I don't know how much those areas have been improving since. Overall I was very excited about Idris and found the syntax a lot more approachable than Haskell. If the meager library of third-party and community packages is an important factor or not depends a lot on the domain. I really wish some powerful corp would pick up Idris and put contributions and/or funding to it.
- tzjmetron 6y agoPrecisely my experience as well! I also wish Edwin would get some sort of corporate backing so that Idris could be funded to get into production-ready mode. Idris2 is much faster (both compilation wise as well as execution wise) than Idris1, but the standard library is not done (as are parts of the language itself). I would love to be able to write production code in Idris rather than patching together a million Haskell extensions.