2 ms·

Modern languages generally have much fancier type systems (Algol 60 didn't even have records!). Perhaps more importantly, modern compilers do optimizations that

Modern languages generally have much fancier type systems (Algol 60 didn't even have records!). Perhaps more importantly, modern compilers do optimizations that I doubt anyone back in 1960s even dreamed of.

pjmlp 2y ago
Yet the specific problem of compilation times only affect a subset of modern languages, e.g. it takes a fraction of time to compile an Ada/SPARK application versus C++, or Rust, although the type system is equally rather complex. Or the development workflow in Haskell and OCaml is much better than Rust, despite having a rather complex type system, because those ecosystems have invested into having interpreted toolchains, also able to load compiled code.
- int_19h 2y ago
  The way Ada handles generics removes a lot of complexity wrt things like inference and overload resolution, but at the expense of making things less convenient for the programmer because of the need to explicitly instantiate. Rust and C++ are at this weird intersection of features where, on one hand, they need to have very fancy optimizers to remove all the overhead that idiomatic high-level library code (including stdlib) has, and on the other, they have generics and some degree of type inference that results in lots of generated code that consequently needs to go through the optimizer. You can argue that it is that intersection that it itself problematic. But then again, C++ is arguably so popular precisely because it offers it, and Rust became popular because it was the first thing other than C++ that targeted the same broad niche.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Ada 2022/SPARK has plenty of complex language features, not sure why callout to generics in particular. Using C++23 modules (import std) is quite fast, even more so with binary libraries, or the proprietary C++ Builder packages, and has been proven that the reason Rust is slow is the amount of unoptimized IR code the frontend shoves down into LLVM backend, and not the type system. What I argue is the lack of investment in compiler tooling, once upon a time IBM and Lucid, showed the world how to have a Smalltalk/Lisp Machine like experience with C++ for example.

pjmlp 2y ago

Yet the specific problem of compilation times only affect a subset of modern languages, e.g. it takes a fraction of time to compile an Ada/SPARK application versus C++, or Rust, although the type system is equally rather complex. Or the development workflow in Haskell and OCaml is much better than Rust, despite having a rather complex type system, because those ecosystems have invested into having interpreted toolchains, also able to load compiled code.

int_19h 2y ago
The way Ada handles generics removes a lot of complexity wrt things like inference and overload resolution, but at the expense of making things less convenient for the programmer because of the need to explicitly instantiate. Rust and C++ are at this weird intersection of features where, on one hand, they need to have very fancy optimizers to remove all the overhead that idiomatic high-level library code (including stdlib) has, and on the other, they have generics and some degree of type inference that results in lots of generated code that consequently needs to go through the optimizer. You can argue that it is that intersection that it itself problematic. But then again, C++ is arguably so popular precisely because it offers it, and Rust became popular because it was the first thing other than C++ that targeted the same broad niche.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Ada 2022/SPARK has plenty of complex language features, not sure why callout to generics in particular. Using C++23 modules (import std) is quite fast, even more so with binary libraries, or the proprietary C++ Builder packages, and has been proven that the reason Rust is slow is the amount of unoptimized IR code the frontend shoves down into LLVM backend, and not the type system. What I argue is the lack of investment in compiler tooling, once upon a time IBM and Lucid, showed the world how to have a Smalltalk/Lisp Machine like experience with C++ for example.