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I’ve never heard of Koka before (one of its stated predecessors), but Koka seems really intriguing. Has anyone used it?

by 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

cies 5y ago
Super cool indeed. I learned MSFT pulled funding for this project. Sadly.
- anfelor 5y ago
  No, that seems wrong. Its currently only Daan working on this, but as you can see the last commit to 'master' was 7 days ago and the last commit to 'dev' yesterday...
  - cies 5y ago
    So was there MSFT funding? And is there now MSFT funding? That it gets continued as a hobby project does not mean it was not funded at some point (and is no longer). But I'm not sure about my statement; no source also (just remember reading it). CORRECTION: as can be read rest of the thread, Koka is being funded by MSFT.
    - anfelor 5y ago
      Daan is employed full-time at MS Research and gets to spend this time on Koka (when he is not writing conference papers). There is currently no further funding or deployment of Koka within Microsoft that I know of (unlike mimalloc which seems to be used by Azure and Bing).
      - cies 5y ago
        Thanks for setting this straight!
anfelor 5y ago
Yes, I am currently writing a masters thesis about it! It is a "research language that [is] currently under heavy development" as the README says so I don't recommend using it for anything other than a research/toy project. But you would be surprised how well it works: Algebraic effects can give you 98% the power of monads while being much faster and easier to understand. And then Koka uses mimalloc [0], Perceus [1] and tail recursion modulo cons which make Koka programs almost as fast as C++. For example, in the benchmarksgame, Haskell takes 5x as much time on the binarytrees benchmark as the fastest implementation, while Koka is 50% slower (similar to other C/C++ and Rust implementations). [0]: https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25464354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25464354
- igouy 5y ago
  > Haskell takes 5x as much time … as the fastest implementation, while Koka is 50% slower (similar to other C/C++ and Rust implementations). Which is to say Koka takes 2x as much time as the fastest for that task ?
  - grumpyprole 5y ago
    That's pretty good considering Koka is a high-level language like Python and JavaScript.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    Huh, now I'm curious whether it means 2x or 1.5x. These graphs on the github look promising https://github.com/koka-lang/koka/blob/master/doc/bench-amd3600-nov-2020.png https://github.com/koka-lang/koka/blob/master/doc/bench-amd3...

I’ve never heard of Koka before (one of its stated predecessors), but Koka seems really intriguing. Has anyone used it?

cies 5y ago

Super cool indeed. I learned MSFT pulled funding for this project. Sadly.

anfelor 5y ago
No, that seems wrong. Its currently only Daan working on this, but as you can see the last commit to 'master' was 7 days ago and the last commit to 'dev' yesterday...
- cies 5y ago
  So was there MSFT funding? And is there now MSFT funding? That it gets continued as a hobby project does not mean it was not funded at some point (and is no longer). But I'm not sure about my statement; no source also (just remember reading it). CORRECTION: as can be read rest of the thread, Koka is being funded by MSFT.
  - anfelor 5y ago
    Daan is employed full-time at MS Research and gets to spend this time on Koka (when he is not writing conference papers). There is currently no further funding or deployment of Koka within Microsoft that I know of (unlike mimalloc which seems to be used by Azure and Bing).
    - cies 5y ago
      Thanks for setting this straight!

anfelor 5y ago

Yes, I am currently writing a masters thesis about it! It is a "research language that [is] currently under heavy development" as the README says so I don't recommend using it for anything other than a research/toy project. But you would be surprised how well it works: Algebraic effects can give you 98% the power of monads while being much faster and easier to understand. And then Koka uses mimalloc [0], Perceus [1] and tail recursion modulo cons which make Koka programs almost as fast as C++. For example, in the benchmarksgame, Haskell takes 5x as much time on the binarytrees benchmark as the fastest implementation, while Koka is 50% slower (similar to other C/C++ and Rust implementations). [0]: https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25464354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25464354

igouy 5y ago
> Haskell takes 5x as much time … as the fastest implementation, while Koka is 50% slower (similar to other C/C++ and Rust implementations). Which is to say Koka takes 2x as much time as the fastest for that task ?
- grumpyprole 5y ago
  That's pretty good considering Koka is a high-level language like Python and JavaScript.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  Huh, now I'm curious whether it means 2x or 1.5x. These graphs on the github look promising https://github.com/koka-lang/koka/blob/master/doc/bench-amd3600-nov-2020.png https://github.com/koka-lang/koka/blob/master/doc/bench-amd3...