bytestring VS ghc

The documentation is itself fairly funny, for those who don’t care to click ahead:

> This "function" has a superficial similarity to ‘unsafePerformIO’ but it is in fact a malevolent agent of chaos. It unpicks the seams of reality (and the IO monad) so that the normal rules no longer apply. It lulls you into thinking it is reasonable, but when you are not looking it stabs you in the back and aliases all of your mutable buffers. The carcass of many a seasoned Haskell programmer lie strewn at its feet.

> Witness the trail of destruction:

    https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/commit/71c4b438c675aa360c79d79acc9a491e7bbc26e7

If you bring in efficient strings from bytestring, densely packed arrays from vector, and an in-place sort from vector-algorithms, you can bring it down to 275ms (uses 19MB of mem).

bytestring

Note that this release is broken for Windows.

I've opened https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/issues/455 so the situation can be improved. You're very welcome to chime in on the discussion or to contribute some of the missing documentation yourself! :)

Highlights from the changelog:

Well, ByteString in particular should not have an IsString instance in a new report. That's pretty clear by https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/issues/140 : the concensus is that there is no good solution right now, but it should not have gotten an IsString instance in the first place. If a theoretical new Haskell Report 202x includes OverloadedStrings (as it should) to handle string literals analogously to numeric literals, I'd expect it to not give ByteString (which is really just a collection of octets) an IsString instance, with all it's issues and rattail due to the encoding question being implicitized.

Standard streaming libraries. They are being written by people that make the effort to understand performance and I have a hope that they make sure their streams run in linear space under any optimizations. It is curious and unsettling that we have standard lazy text and byte streams at the same time — and the default lazy lists, of course. I have been doing some work on byte streams and what I found out is that there is no way to check that your folds are actually space constant even if the value in question is a primitive, like say a byte — thunks may explode and then collapse over the run time of a single computation, defying any effort at inspection.

of course it does! what else would you call something like chicken scheme [https://call-cc.org/], ats [https://ats-lang.sourceforge.net/], or ghc [https://www.haskell.org/ghc/]? they are not "scripts", they are full-blown compilers that happen to use C as their compilation target, and then leverage C compilers to generate code for a variety of architecures. it's a very sensible way to do things.

Agree about Haskell... as far as I'm aware there is actually no declarative/easily-readable definition of the Haskell syntax that is also complete, especially when it comes to the indentation rules, and the syntax is basically defined by the very (ironically) imperatively-defined GHC parser[0].

I prefer a syntax like in Pure[1], where the ambiguous, hard to parse indentation-based syntax is replaced by explicit semicolons (Yeah, you can use braces/semicolons in Haskell as well, but most code doesn't).

[0] https://github.com/ghc/ghc/blob/master/compiler/GHC/Parser/L...

[1] https://agraef.github.io/pure-lang/

GHC, the main Haskell compiler

GHCi, version 9.6.3: https://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help Loaded GHCi configuration from /Users/daniel/.ghci ghci> :{ | split :: Float -> [Int] | split value = map(read . (:[])) . show | :} :3:15: error: [GHC-83865] • Couldn't match expected type: [Int] with actual type: a0 -> [b0] • Probable cause: ‘(.)’ is applied to too few arguments In the expression: map (read . (: [])) . show In an equation for ‘split’: split value = map (read . (: [])) . show

GHC is hosted on Gitlab, the Github repo is just a mirror. So money.

https://github.com/ghc/ghc

☁ ~ ghci GHCi, version 9.4.7: https://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help ghci> 6 + 3^2 * 4 42

Depending on who you ask, a programming language can be different things. If you ask the Haskell community, many will tell you that the language is the Haskell specification, and that what currently is being used is not Haskell itself, but an extension of Haskell that is supported by the GHC compiler. Similar to the C language, a programming language would be a specification.

GHCi, version 9.4.2: https://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help Loaded GHCi configuration from ~/.dotfiles/ghc/.ghc/ghci.conf