4 ms·

I can't offer an answer specific to Haskell, but I know that OCaml does some things to make the compilation fast: interface files, no circular dependencies, no

by Zababa 5y ago

I can't offer an answer specific to Haskell, but I know that OCaml does some things to make the compilation fast: interface files, no circular dependencies, no forward declarations, not a lot of optimizations. From what I understand, those tradeoffs come from languages designed by Niklaus Wirth, where efficiency of compilation was important. In general, I feel like every language that wasn't made to compile fast like Go, OCaml, Pascal and derivatives is going to be called "slow to compile". There's Java and C# that are kind of a middle-ground, since they emit bytecode for a JIT compiler. So my answer to "why Haskell compilation times are so long compared to some other languages?" would be "because compilation times don't take priority over some other points for Haskell and its users".

funcDropShadow 5y ago
Haskell compiles so slow because it needs way more optimizations then Ocaml before it performs good. The primary reason for that is its lazy evaluation semantics. Prior to GHC many researchers believed it to be impossible to execute lazy languages with comparable speed than imperative ones. Haskell and GHC were primarily developed as research tools. I.e. they valued the efficient exploration of new ideas in programming languages and implementations higher than the resulting language and implementation, at least in the beginning. And I would say Haskell was extremely successful considering those priorities. That does not mean, that the implementation hasn't been moving towards industry-readiness for a long time.