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DB vendors generally don't write Haskell clients, which put a serious damper on my "test lots of databases for a living" project. Love Haskell as a language, bu

by aphyr 3y ago

DB vendors generally don't write Haskell clients, which put a serious damper on my "test lots of databases for a living" project. Love Haskell as a language, but it's just not a popular target, and I wasn't brave enough to go for C interop. As I touched on in the post, Haskell is also rigorous about side effects--I've found it difficult to, say, inject side-effectual performance monitoring into an otherwise pure piece of code so I can profile it. Maybe Haskell experts are better at this, or the story is better now. There was a Ruby version of Jepsen too. That enjoyed better library support and language flexibility, but it suffered from terrible performance, a standard library built for mutability, and a janky thread model. There was, at the time, essentially no way to reliably time out a Ruby thread. That was a dealbreaker all in itself. I wrote some of Jepsen in Erlang too, but abandoned the project quickly. It's got a really good concurrency story. A VM designed for concurrency and failure with bounded reduction queues--honestly this is something I miss in the JVM. I love Erlang as a language (and I think some of my Erlang might still be in prod!) but it also suffered from a lack of client support, not being well-suited for high-speed mutable state, and generally terrible string manipulation. There's a lot of strings in Jepsen. ;-)

travisgriggs 3y ago
Came here to ask about Elixir, since the opener requirements of your post kind seem like a sales pitch for the things OTP people get excited about. This last bit answers that though I think. Thanks.
koito17 3y ago
So you tried Haskell, Ruby, and Erlang, and each had their own deal breakers (database clients, threading, controlling side effects, etc). This is all worth mentioning in the article IMO. I love using Clojure, but I will admit that the article left me wanting an explanation just like the one you've provided here. Thanks for taking the time to respond!
asa400 3y ago
Just to add an additional anecdote/perspective for other folks curious about the Erlang mention: the lack of client support in Erlang/Elixir is real, unfortunately. Just an artifact of it being a smaller ecosystem, but it's improving all the time. You can do mutable state manipulation in Erlang/Elixir through a few mechanisms - ETS tables is the main one - but it's not "high-speed" in the sense you find in C/Java/Rust/etc., where you want to bash on a slice of mutable, contiguous memory containing primitive (word sized/aligned) values. It's also a bit awkward, as ETS tables are more like having Redis inside your application than they are an actual collection type. Regarding string manipulation, strings in Elixir are actually quite good. This is one of Erlang's sore spots that Elixir improved upon. I'd put Elixir's string manipulation facilities up against anything I've used, including Java and Clojure. And +1 to the point about Erlang's concurrency story. If you have a highly concurrent problem, Erlang/Elixir really is best in class. It isn't a perfect technology by any means but it really is as good as everyone says it is.

by aphyr 3y ago

travisgriggs 3y ago

Came here to ask about Elixir, since the opener requirements of your post kind seem like a sales pitch for the things OTP people get excited about. This last bit answers that though I think. Thanks.

koito17 3y ago

So you tried Haskell, Ruby, and Erlang, and each had their own deal breakers (database clients, threading, controlling side effects, etc). This is all worth mentioning in the article IMO. I love using Clojure, but I will admit that the article left me wanting an explanation just like the one you've provided here. Thanks for taking the time to respond!

asa400 3y ago

Just to add an additional anecdote/perspective for other folks curious about the Erlang mention: the lack of client support in Erlang/Elixir is real, unfortunately. Just an artifact of it being a smaller ecosystem, but it's improving all the time. You can do mutable state manipulation in Erlang/Elixir through a few mechanisms - ETS tables is the main one - but it's not "high-speed" in the sense you find in C/Java/Rust/etc., where you want to bash on a slice of mutable, contiguous memory containing primitive (word sized/aligned) values. It's also a bit awkward, as ETS tables are more like having Redis inside your application than they are an actual collection type. Regarding string manipulation, strings in Elixir are actually quite good. This is one of Erlang's sore spots that Elixir improved upon. I'd put Elixir's string manipulation facilities up against anything I've used, including Java and Clojure. And +1 to the point about Erlang's concurrency story. If you have a highly concurrent problem, Erlang/Elixir really is best in class. It isn't a perfect technology by any means but it really is as good as everyone says it is.