3 ms·

You forgot the other drawbacks that complicated type systems have: hellish compiler messages and long compile times. Those don't go away just because you learn

You forgot the other drawbacks that complicated type systems have: hellish compiler messages and long compile times. Those don't go away just because you learn more about the language. I also dispute the idea that only novices abuse complicated type systems. Actually I think it's the reverse... only people who know the language well can create something truly horrible. Don't believe me? Look at any of the C++ STL header files and experience Biij. Of course, just because they can doesn't mean they will. But in a world dominated by people of average intelligence, working around the programming equivalent of a gas lamp with an open flame just isn't a good idea.

tekacs 12y ago
> drawbacks that complicated type systems have: hellish compiler messages and long compile times Scala has incredibly nice compiler messages and you can see Rust for an example of a language with complex types and short compile times. These issues have _nothing_ to do with complicated type systems - you're projecting the failures of the C++ template system - failures which stem in fair part from the fact that it's not really a type system but simply a templater. Finally, it's worth recognising that Scala goes to lengths to keep messy features inside their own compilation unit - for example, macros appear as functions to the outside and complex features such as implicit conversions must be explicitly imported for use. I tried building our project in Go and Node.js explicitly to make it as easy as possible for people to contribute, irrespective of their background. It turned out that the additional complexity I had to pump into abstractions to make it happen made the code just as complex to understand. It's quite possible that projects just have a natural complexity level and it's worth picking the language to match. There are certainly different times for different languages.
- Jweb_Guru 12y ago
  As much as I like Rust, I have to say that it's not advancing a compelling argument for "fast compilers with complex types" (which isn't to say I don't think it can be done, just that Rust is by no means fast at compiling, and really only gets away with the slowness it has because its main competition still lacks a proper module system).
  - kibwen 12y ago
    Rust's type system has nothing to do with any slowness in its compiler. There's a `time-passes` flag that you can pass to the compiler to see where it spends its time compiling any given program. Do so and you'll see that the overwhelming majority of Rust's compilation time is spent inside LLVM generating code.

tekacs 12y ago

> drawbacks that complicated type systems have: hellish compiler messages and long compile times Scala has incredibly nice compiler messages and you can see Rust for an example of a language with complex types and short compile times. These issues have _nothing_ to do with complicated type systems - you're projecting the failures of the C++ template system - failures which stem in fair part from the fact that it's not really a type system but simply a templater. Finally, it's worth recognising that Scala goes to lengths to keep messy features inside their own compilation unit - for example, macros appear as functions to the outside and complex features such as implicit conversions must be explicitly imported for use. I tried building our project in Go and Node.js explicitly to make it as easy as possible for people to contribute, irrespective of their background. It turned out that the additional complexity I had to pump into abstractions to make it happen made the code just as complex to understand. It's quite possible that projects just have a natural complexity level and it's worth picking the language to match. There are certainly different times for different languages.

Jweb_Guru 12y ago
As much as I like Rust, I have to say that it's not advancing a compelling argument for "fast compilers with complex types" (which isn't to say I don't think it can be done, just that Rust is by no means fast at compiling, and really only gets away with the slowness it has because its main competition still lacks a proper module system).
- kibwen 12y ago
  Rust's type system has nothing to do with any slowness in its compiler. There's a `time-passes` flag that you can pass to the compiler to see where it spends its time compiling any given program. Do so and you'll see that the overwhelming majority of Rust's compilation time is spent inside LLVM generating code.