4 ms·

TIL that Ocaml/SML are compiled into lambda expressions... I literally thought lambda calculus is only used in CS classes. OCaml's syntax is pretty annoying bu

by dgan 4y ago

TIL that Ocaml/SML are compiled into lambda expressions... I literally thought lambda calculus is only used in CS classes. OCaml's syntax is pretty annoying but type inference is actually amazing.. I changed my mind over it, as previously I thought explicit type annotations are simpler. Turns out, it would be humanly impossible to explicitly annotate every piece of OCaml, just let the compiler do it for you

kryptiskt 4y ago
GHC's Core language is amazingly small https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/commentary/compiler/core-syn-type https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/commentary/compil..., and it's just polymorphic lambda calculus (with coercions added a while ago).
eatonphil 4y ago
Did you learn that from some other article? I couldn't find "lambda" in this page. I think it's too much to say that all Standard ML compilers work or one way or another. There are 6 major compilers and a number of minor ones. They don't really follow the same approaches in general.
- frou_dh 4y ago
  At a higher level that that, it's cool that even in SML's already sparse surface-level syntax, quite of a bit of it is just sugar for each other: https://i.imgur.com/pkSg4xm.png https://i.imgur.com/pkSg4xm.png
  - eatonphil 4y ago
    That may be the semantics of it and for simple compilers that may be a true transform. But as compilers get more mature they tend to specialize everywhere they can so the actual compiler doing this under the hood may or may not happen.
- octachron 4y ago
  One of the intermediary representation used by the OCaml compiler is a lambda calculus (https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/lambda/lambda.mli#L279 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/lambda/lambda.mli#...). But yes, this is only the OCaml compiler.
giraffe_lady 4y ago
What do you not like about the syntax? I hear this often, and I vaguely remember not liking it myself at one point. But it was also my first ML and now I can't remember what specifically I found unpleasant. I do think I've partially ascended into senior dev galaxy brain around syntax though. For the most part I think they're all fine and also all bad and also don't matter very much at all.

by dgan 4y ago

kryptiskt 4y ago

GHC's Core language is amazingly small https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/commentary/compiler/core-syn-type https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/commentary/compil..., and it's just polymorphic lambda calculus (with coercions added a while ago).

eatonphil 4y ago

Did you learn that from some other article? I couldn't find "lambda" in this page. I think it's too much to say that all Standard ML compilers work or one way or another. There are 6 major compilers and a number of minor ones. They don't really follow the same approaches in general.

frou_dh 4y ago
At a higher level that that, it's cool that even in SML's already sparse surface-level syntax, quite of a bit of it is just sugar for each other: https://i.imgur.com/pkSg4xm.png https://i.imgur.com/pkSg4xm.png
- eatonphil 4y ago
  That may be the semantics of it and for simple compilers that may be a true transform. But as compilers get more mature they tend to specialize everywhere they can so the actual compiler doing this under the hood may or may not happen.
octachron 4y ago
One of the intermediary representation used by the OCaml compiler is a lambda calculus (https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/lambda/lambda.mli#L279 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/lambda/lambda.mli#...). But yes, this is only the OCaml compiler.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

What do you not like about the syntax? I hear this often, and I vaguely remember not liking it myself at one point. But it was also my first ML and now I can't remember what specifically I found unpleasant. I do think I've partially ascended into senior dev galaxy brain around syntax though. For the most part I think they're all fine and also all bad and also don't matter very much at all.