Pipefish VS ocaml

Charm is a language where Functional-Core/Imperative-Shell is the language paradigm and not just something you can choose to do in Python or Ruby or PHP or JS or your favorite lightweight dynamic language. Because of the sort of use-cases that this implies, it didn't seem suitable to write another Lisp or another ML, so I got to do some completely blank-slate design. This gives us Charm, a functional language which has no pattern-matching, no currying, no monads, no macros, no homoiconicity, nor a mathematically interesting type system — but which does have purity, referential transparency, immutability, multiple dispatch, a touch of lazy evaluation, REPL-oriented development, hotcoding, microservices … and SQL interop because everyone's going to want that.

I think it's fair to call this a language announcement because although I've been posting here about this project for a loooong time, I've finally gotten to what I'm going to call a "working prototype" as defined here. Charm has a complete core language, it has libraries and tooling, it has some new and awesome features of its own. So … welcome to Charm 0.4! Installation instructions are here. It has a language tutorial/manual/wiki, besides lots of other documentation; people who just want to dive straight in could look at the tutorial Writing an Adventure Game in Charm.

In my own language there is some syntactic flexibility but the only thing that describe pretty table could mean would be the second of the possibilities above; the first would be expressed by describe prettyTable and the third by describe PRETTY, table. This makes it more readable from the point of view of a coder, and who else is going to want to read it, my mom?

I've been trying to think of a way of doing this which is simple and consistent and which can be extended by other people, so if someone wanted to embed e.g. Prolog in Charm they could do it without any help from me.

Charm does this for declaration of local constants in functions (there are no local variables in functions). So for example if you wanted to write the Collatz function this way (which you wouldn't, it's just a minimal example) then you could do so without worrying about a computational explosion:

I guess it's time for me to put aside my exploration of Charm and set up a collaboration with my son the lyricist.

In fact that's how a lot of Charm programs end up getting written, because you want to pass a whole bundle of stuff to the functions. For example.

No, it's "shell" as in "shell of the code". The idea is that the imperative bits of the language, the bits that do the mutation of state and the IO, can can call lovely pure referentially transparent functions. But functions can't call commands (otherwise by definition they wouldn't be pure). So all your imperative-ness is reduced to about 1% of your code which lives right at the top of your call stack --- the "imperative shell" of your code. See [here](https://github.com/tim-hardcastle/Charm/blob/main/examples/adv.ch) for an example. The "imperative shell" is the main function --- all 13 lines of it --- and everything everywhere else is pure and immutable.

I'm not sure what counts as cool. It's just dogfooding at the moment. I did a bunch of other languages (only the BASIC and the Forth are up to date with the current version of the language I think), and I did a tiny adventure game (and used it as the basis for a tutorial).

> OCaml’s configure script is also “normal”

If that’s this OCaml, it has a configure.ac file in the root directory, which looks suspicious for an Autotools-free package: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml

You probably already know, but with OCaml 5 the only way to get flamegraphs working is to either:

* use framepointers [1]

* use LBR (but LBR has a limited depth, and may not work on on all CPUs, I'm assuming due to bugs in perf)

* implement some deep changes in how perf works to handle the 2 stacks in OCaml (I don't even know if this would be possible), or write/adapt some eBPF code to do it

OCaml 5 has a separate stack for OCaml code and C code, and although GDB can link them based on DWARF info, perf DWARF call-graphs cannot (https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/issues/12563#issuecomment-193...)

If you need more evidence to keep it enabled in future releases, you can use OCaml 5 as an example (unfortunately there aren't many OCaml applications, so that may not carry too much weight on its own).

[1]: I haven't actually realised that Fedora39 has already enabled FP by default, nice! (I still do most of my day-to-day profiling on an ~CentOS 7 system with 'perf --call-graph dwarf', I was aware that there was a discussion to enable FP by default, but haven't noticed it has actually been done already)

11. OCaml - $91,026

> It partially helps since it forces you to have types where they matters most: exported functions

But the problém the OP has is not knowing the types when reading the source (in the .ml file).

> How would it feels like to use list if only https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/stdlib/list.ml was available,

If the signature where in the source file (which you can do in OCaml too), there would be no problem - which is what all the other (for some definition of "other") languages except C and C++ (even Fortran) do.

No, really, I can't see a single advantage of separate .mli files at all. The real problém is that the documentation is often worse too, as the .mli is autogenerated and documented afterwards - and now changes made later in the sources need to be documented in the mli too, so anything that doesn't change the type often gets lost. The same happens in C and C++ with header files.

If you have been in the Ruby community for the past couple of years, it's possible that you're not a super fan of types or that this concept never passed through your mind, and that's totally cool. I myself love the dynamic and meta-programming nature of Ruby, and honestly, by the time of this article's writing, we aren't on the level of OCaml for type checking and inference, but still, there are a couple of nice things that types with sorbet bring to the table:

Looks like there have been proposals to eliminate use of 3 operand lea in OCaml code (not accepted sadly):

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/8531

An amazing example is Ocaml lang logo / mascot. It might be useful to talk with them to know what was the process behind this work. The About page camel head on Perl dot org header is also a pretty good example of simplification, but it's not a logo, just a friendly illustration, as the O'Reilly camel is. Another notable logo for this animal is the well known tobacco industry company, but don't get me started on that (“good” logo, though, if we look at the effectiveness of their marketing).

Haskell and Agda are probably the most obvious examples. Ocaml too, but it is much older, so its type system is not as categorical. There is also Idris, which is not as well-known but is very cool.

That does sound problematic, but without the code it is hard to tell what is the issue. Typically, compiling a 6kLoc file like https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/typing/typecore.ml takes 0.8 s on my machine.