5 ms·

Thanks for this article, it's really well written and engaging. But here, I cannot resist: > You can just compute with floats or doubles as if the type system

Thanks for this article, it's really well written and engaging. But here, I cannot resist: > You can just compute with floats or doubles as if the type system doesn’t exist. Except when you can't! I want to plot a stupid array of floats. Yet it takes 10 seconds because it is juggling useless types around. A complex type system may be a nice thing to have, if you really want it, but it is definitely not "free", and it always involves serious compromises that make other things impossible or very cumbersome. I would like an option like --type=float in the interpreter that assumed that all numbers are of that type and ran extremely fast.

leephillips 6y ago
I’m glad you liked the article. Obviously the 10 second or so of precompilation time is a big issue for you. I guess I have no further suggestions about that other than to suggest again to look at creating sysimages (learning how to do this is on my to-do list).
- enriquto 6y ago
  > I’m glad you liked the article. I was particularly "seduced" by the idea of using a standard ODE solver directly on quaternions. Having worked in the smoothing of 3D camera trajectories the last year, I would have definitely loved to know that at the time!