rahulmutt

Yeah and it also allows addressing beyond 2GB. I've been using DirectByteBuffers for the sake of being compatible with Android which I think doesn't give you access to the Unsafe API probably. I'll see if I can add a compiler option to use Unsafe for the JVMs that have it in the future. That'll probably do wonders for performance since Unsafe APIs are intrinsics. Unsafe is currently used in the Eta RTS for atomic CAS operations (which should be compatible in Android) on some of the RTS data types.

Throughout eta-lang.org we use a custom syntax highlighter we developed for CodeMirror (used in the playground) and Pygments for the static code examples throughout the docs. We will translate these to other platforms like Emacs, Vim, Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc. once IDE support is better.

Performance of a tiny code sample is not why people select one language over another. If that was the case, no one would be using anything besides assembly or C. Even in other languages, you'll use an abstraction heavy implementation for the benefit of long-term maintenance and code evolution and then performance optimise the bits that can pack a punch. Performance optimisation in any language looks ugly be it C or Haskell.

Thanks for the fix! It's up on the site now.

There are plans to make the compiler self-hoisting once it's more stable. The little bit of C used is just to turn on an option in the GHC runtime for profiling purposes. That would be replaced with some Java code to turn on an option in the Eta runtime if it were self-hoisting.

I should mention that a good testing discipline is required in Eta as well but you would focus your testing on high-level properties using frameworks like QuickCheck. Moreover, you don't lose as much if you don't write tests like you would in dynamic languages like Clojure.

Thanks for the example! My point was not that you can't test effectively in Clojure, but just that doing things like refactoring is much easier in Eta because of the numerous static checks.

Given the recent interest in reactive programming, people will probably like the built-in support for streams via lazy lists in Eta.

You can probably tell it's been a long day. Thanks for the catch! The fix should be visible in a couple minutes.

Laziness by default does not mean you can't have strict primitive types, which Eta does. Moreover, if you ever want to avoid object references in performance-sensitive contexts, you can allocate off-heap memory and work directly with that via the Ptr mechanism (which is backed by DirectByteBuffers). GHC 8 recently got compound values with an extension called UnboxedSums. It would be tricky to implement on the JVM though in Eta, but not impossible.

Lisp is sexy, but parenthesis are a really hard sell for the wide crowd. It sounds silly, but that's the reality. If they had forced people to learn & use Lisp instead of C, the world might be a very different place. I personally love them even now when I look back at Clojure code.

Clojurescript is just wonderful. I'm not even sure a Haskell-like language that compiles to JavaScript (Elm, PureScript, GHCJS) with really good tooling can beat it, though I haven't tried. Would be an interesting experiment to do a comparison by writing the same app in all the languages.

Thanks for bringing this up! I will definitely add a section for explaining the benefits for Scala and Clojure devs. I shipped a non-trivial Clojure web service to production that was handling 1M/requests a day. The experience is what made me finally understand that the JVM is wonderful platform, and what prompted me to work on Eta, given that Frege was insufficient for what I wanted (not supporting a lot of useful GHC extensions). Clojure was wonderful in the fact that I could become as concise as I wanted via EDSLs, and the immutability by default + concurrency primitive were a joy. The lack a type system (please don't mention core.typed) and compile-time errors at runtime were really a pain. I'm sure you can ameliorate that with libraries like prismatic/schema (which I did) and strong test discipline, but it's great when the compiler just takes care of all of that for you. Once you really "get" Haskell-like languages, you miss the benefits no matter what language you try. As for Scala, I haven't built anything significant and I wouldn't want to for some of the examples I've seen. It's too verbose for a typed functional language.

I think it might interest you that Haskell-like languages are one of the best languages for programming EDSLs after Lisp-like languages. If I recall correctly, Standard Chartered uses an EDSL written in Haskell that's maintained by ~10 Haskell programmers and the remaining ~90 people program inside of this EDSL for specifying new rules. Similar case for Facebook and their spam filter rules.

You would be correct if we branded it as "the" powerful language, but we used "a" meaning it's one of many for you, the programmer to chose. I have practically found Haskell-like languages to deliver lots of value in business settings and I want to bring those advantages to everyone who would like to take advantage of it, reducing the risk of adoption as much as possible. No user ever cared about the programming paradigm, but I think they would be happy if bugs were fixed faster (or not present in the first place) or if new features were added without breaking existing features.