4 ms·

Including work-stealing scheduler and runtime? Ability to just spawn 50_000 tasks -- regardless of whether they're CPU-intensive or I/O bound -- and have the ru

Including work-stealing scheduler and runtime? Ability to just spawn 50_000 tasks -- regardless of whether they're CPU-intensive or I/O bound -- and have the runtime handle it speedily? I've heard Haskell praise a good amount of times but at the same time many people also said that doing actual work with it has more friction than it should, so I don't know.

shirogane86x 4y ago
I don't know if those things you ask are in Haskell specifically, but what I do know is that Haskell concurrency is pretty much best in class. You get channels (Control.Concurrent.Chan is in the stdlib), STM, green threads (forkIO). You can also get stuff like async (from the async library) or streamly (even higher level than traditional async). I'm not 100% sure if you can push insane speeds with it (even though Haskell is really fast, it's just very tricky to optimize correctly) like you can with Rust, but the developer experience on concurrency is just through the roof, imho (dare I say even better than rust). STM is just the best kind of magic.
pjmlp 4y ago
Yes, as they say back home, "when you are going I am coming back". "Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell" (2013) https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/parallel-and-concurrent/9781449335939/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/parallel-and-concurrent...
- pdimitar 4y ago
  I've heard that many times, still skeptical after trying Haskell thrice. Have Haskell's ergonomics improved? I feel your snark is unjustified. You might be putting people in two extremes: wise elders and hip kids. There's a huge amount of people in-between however. (Also, the saying actually is: "You're going to where I am coming back from".) Find me something like Erlang/Elixir with the speed of Rust and I won't learn another programming language ever again. No? Then the search continues. So far Haskell hasn't impressed. In all honesty Rust is quite hard to put in that niche as well since its `async` stuff is extremely annoying and hard to get right but I guess the tries are still ongoing. OCaml is progressing but who knows when will they get there.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    You might find an answer at Facebook infrastructure.... https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam-with-haskell/ https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam...
    - pdimitar 4y ago
      I'll go through that, thanks. But so far it still seems that Haskell is an acquired taste and that's a shame. You have to overcome a number of idiosyncrasies to get productive. As a guy who went through at least 8 languages and 30+ frameworks, it gets tiring. I want something that ticks most boxes from the get go.
  - wyager 4y ago
    > Find me something like Erlang/Elixir with the speed of Rust and I won't learn another programming language ever again. You're describing haskell again. You haven't articulated why you have disliked haskell in the past.
    - pdimitar 4y ago
      Mostly the seemingly big initial learning curve; you have to get extensively onboarded in "the Haskell way" (monads are not hard to get but the community is hell-bent on avoiding wording that makes it easier to grok; why?). That could be okay for many but as I get older, I tend to take people/organizations that require big upfront investment less seriously. Example: one of the things Elixir has won me over with were its bite-sized introductions and practices. You can be a 3/10 Elixir dev and you can be a 8/10 one, and that's mostly depending on how many of the official tutorials you've covered. The road is mostly a straight line to an acceptable level of proficiency at the end of which you can start choosing to specialize. Rust, OCaml, Haskell -- they all failed that test for me. I picked Rust mostly because of the no-GC situation and because of `cargo`. Many older programmers handwave away the importance of good tooling and this is where they lose a lot of potential mind share that can rejuvenate their languages / ecosystems. Example on this: OCaml's tooling. A lot of people in this ecosystem always degrade the importance of a good task runner + builder + project manager. I spent half a weekend learning `esy` once and mostly tamed it by making it imitate mix/cargo but it wasn't trivial. The end result is a build script that does 80% of what mix/cargo do. The exercise made me scratch my head wondering why what I did back then isn't upstreamed and made official and why is everyone happy to pretend that building an OCaml project is a solved problem when it (very!) clearly isn't. Haskell's cabal didn't fare better last I tried it -- admittedly that was more than a year ago. If Haskell has good bite-sized lessons that lead to an actual real job productivity (less academic exercises, please!) then I'd be happy to give it a fair try and maybe make it a part of my toolbox.
wyager 4y ago
Yes. Go spawn a million tasks in haskell. It will work fine. 50k is child's play for GHC runtime. Only serious competitor is BEAM.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  Yep, that's what I was getting at: Erlang/Elixir do this effortlessly. I'd love for the popular system languages to have the BEAM runtime. Well, based on your comment, I might reevaluate Haskell. Last time I was severely put off by lack of good tooling (but I did hear cabal was improving) and a fragmented ecosystem. Maybe things have changed.
  - shirogane86x 4y ago
    both cabal and stack have improved, there's now a pretty good language server in HLS, there's ghcup to download and install both GHC and tooling and manage it (both on linux and on windows). And for quick one-off experiments I usually use nix (I don't fully use it, too complex for my brain, but being able to do nix-shell -p 'haskell.packages.ghc{version).ghcWithPackages (pkgs: with pkgs; [any number of packages here])' is just an insane superpower that lets me experiment stuff in ways that most other ecosystems would dream of)
    - pdimitar 4y ago
      You're probably aware of this but not many share the love for Nix. I tried it and got put off by the unnecessarily alien syntax. They honestly didn't need to invent their own language, there are plenty out there that are pretty close to what they are aiming at. But it's not only that. It's a general problem of a high initial learning curve. Modern tool inventors really have to finally learn that everyone is super busy these days. Make it brain-dead quick to learn or your tool will forever remain a niche curiosity for hobbyists.
      - shirogane86x 4y ago
        I totally get that sentiment about nix, and actually I sort of share a variation of it too: I really want to learn it, and I like the featureset in theory, but I can't get used to it in practice, and I don't have the time to invest myself into something that difficult to get going. The reason I brought up the nix command is that I only use nix, for haskell development, for that specific command: I found it once in a blog post, saved it, then put it under a function into my bashrc, and I use nix quite literally for only that purpose. I've done a lot of development on various functional languages (with a dayjob in F# that lasted 3 years) and being able to quickly experiment with libraries was something that I sorely missed when doing repl experimentation in those languages (I think F# recently got a #nuget directive, but that was after I stopped using it).

shirogane86x 4y ago

I don't know if those things you ask are in Haskell specifically, but what I do know is that Haskell concurrency is pretty much best in class. You get channels (Control.Concurrent.Chan is in the stdlib), STM, green threads (forkIO). You can also get stuff like async (from the async library) or streamly (even higher level than traditional async). I'm not 100% sure if you can push insane speeds with it (even though Haskell is really fast, it's just very tricky to optimize correctly) like you can with Rust, but the developer experience on concurrency is just through the roof, imho (dare I say even better than rust). STM is just the best kind of magic.

pjmlp 4y ago

Yes, as they say back home, "when you are going I am coming back". "Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell" (2013) https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/parallel-and-concurrent/9781449335939/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/parallel-and-concurrent...

pdimitar 4y ago
I've heard that many times, still skeptical after trying Haskell thrice. Have Haskell's ergonomics improved? I feel your snark is unjustified. You might be putting people in two extremes: wise elders and hip kids. There's a huge amount of people in-between however. (Also, the saying actually is: "You're going to where I am coming back from".) Find me something like Erlang/Elixir with the speed of Rust and I won't learn another programming language ever again. No? Then the search continues. So far Haskell hasn't impressed. In all honesty Rust is quite hard to put in that niche as well since its `async` stuff is extremely annoying and hard to get right but I guess the tries are still ongoing. OCaml is progressing but who knows when will they get there.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  You might find an answer at Facebook infrastructure.... https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam-with-haskell/ https://engineering.fb.com/2015/06/26/security/fighting-spam...
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    I'll go through that, thanks. But so far it still seems that Haskell is an acquired taste and that's a shame. You have to overcome a number of idiosyncrasies to get productive. As a guy who went through at least 8 languages and 30+ frameworks, it gets tiring. I want something that ticks most boxes from the get go.
- wyager 4y ago
  > Find me something like Erlang/Elixir with the speed of Rust and I won't learn another programming language ever again. You're describing haskell again. You haven't articulated why you have disliked haskell in the past.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    Mostly the seemingly big initial learning curve; you have to get extensively onboarded in "the Haskell way" (monads are not hard to get but the community is hell-bent on avoiding wording that makes it easier to grok; why?). That could be okay for many but as I get older, I tend to take people/organizations that require big upfront investment less seriously. Example: one of the things Elixir has won me over with were its bite-sized introductions and practices. You can be a 3/10 Elixir dev and you can be a 8/10 one, and that's mostly depending on how many of the official tutorials you've covered. The road is mostly a straight line to an acceptable level of proficiency at the end of which you can start choosing to specialize. Rust, OCaml, Haskell -- they all failed that test for me. I picked Rust mostly because of the no-GC situation and because of `cargo`. Many older programmers handwave away the importance of good tooling and this is where they lose a lot of potential mind share that can rejuvenate their languages / ecosystems. Example on this: OCaml's tooling. A lot of people in this ecosystem always degrade the importance of a good task runner + builder + project manager. I spent half a weekend learning `esy` once and mostly tamed it by making it imitate mix/cargo but it wasn't trivial. The end result is a build script that does 80% of what mix/cargo do. The exercise made me scratch my head wondering why what I did back then isn't upstreamed and made official and why is everyone happy to pretend that building an OCaml project is a solved problem when it (very!) clearly isn't. Haskell's cabal didn't fare better last I tried it -- admittedly that was more than a year ago. If Haskell has good bite-sized lessons that lead to an actual real job productivity (less academic exercises, please!) then I'd be happy to give it a fair try and maybe make it a part of my toolbox.

wyager 4y ago

Yes. Go spawn a million tasks in haskell. It will work fine. 50k is child's play for GHC runtime. Only serious competitor is BEAM.

pdimitar 4y ago
Yep, that's what I was getting at: Erlang/Elixir do this effortlessly. I'd love for the popular system languages to have the BEAM runtime. Well, based on your comment, I might reevaluate Haskell. Last time I was severely put off by lack of good tooling (but I did hear cabal was improving) and a fragmented ecosystem. Maybe things have changed.
- shirogane86x 4y ago
  both cabal and stack have improved, there's now a pretty good language server in HLS, there's ghcup to download and install both GHC and tooling and manage it (both on linux and on windows). And for quick one-off experiments I usually use nix (I don't fully use it, too complex for my brain, but being able to do nix-shell -p 'haskell.packages.ghc{version).ghcWithPackages (pkgs: with pkgs; [any number of packages here])' is just an insane superpower that lets me experiment stuff in ways that most other ecosystems would dream of)
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    You're probably aware of this but not many share the love for Nix. I tried it and got put off by the unnecessarily alien syntax. They honestly didn't need to invent their own language, there are plenty out there that are pretty close to what they are aiming at. But it's not only that. It's a general problem of a high initial learning curve. Modern tool inventors really have to finally learn that everyone is super busy these days. Make it brain-dead quick to learn or your tool will forever remain a niche curiosity for hobbyists.
    - shirogane86x 4y ago
      I totally get that sentiment about nix, and actually I sort of share a variation of it too: I really want to learn it, and I like the featureset in theory, but I can't get used to it in practice, and I don't have the time to invest myself into something that difficult to get going. The reason I brought up the nix command is that I only use nix, for haskell development, for that specific command: I found it once in a blog post, saved it, then put it under a function into my bashrc, and I use nix quite literally for only that purpose. I've done a lot of development on various functional languages (with a dayjob in F# that lasted 3 years) and being able to quickly experiment with libraries was something that I sorely missed when doing repl experimentation in those languages (I think F# recently got a #nuget directive, but that was after I stopped using it).