coalton VS FrameworkBenchmarks

It's still… not the same. In CL (and specially with SBCL), we get compile time (type) errors and warnings at the blink of an eye, when we compile a single function with a keystroke (typically C-c C-c in Slime).

And there's also been improvement, see Coalton for a ML on top of CL. (https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/)

For the parenthetically inclined among us, there's also an implementation in Coalton: <https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/tree/main/examples/t...>

Common Lisp has bad marketing (even OCaml has Twitch streamers and "influencers" now), and bad support for general editors, both of which make it a non-starter for most curious people who have an afternoon to try something. But behind all that is magnificent activity for those who got over the initial potential energy barrier. Just to give some examples:

1. SBCL, the most popular open source implementation of Lisp, is seeing potentially two new garbage collectors. One of them is a parallel collector written by a university student (!!) which blows my mind.

2. SBCL has better and better support for deploying Liwp as a C-compatible shared library, using SBCL-LIBRARIAN. It makes it play nicer with other applications in C and Python.

3. Coalton is another exciting development that allows a Haskell type system and "Lisp-1" functional programming in Common Lisp. That means type classes (or traits), something Lisp hasn't really had a proper notion of, and full type inference. Persistent sequences based off of RRB-trees were recently merged, and interestingly, they're implemented purely in Coalton [1]. That means Clojure-like seqs.

It's interesting to see users of Lisp generating the above ideas and libraries, not a special in-group of committees, "official" developers, etc.

[1] https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/blob/main/library/se...

Use an editor that auto-inserts parens and that indents the code correctly. Now nothing bad can happen. And the parens are used to edit code structurally.

re typing: Coalton brings Haskell-like typing on top of CL. https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/ Other lisps are typed: typed racket, Carp… and btw, SBCL's compiler brings some welcome type warnings and errors (unlike Python, for instance).

If you like type safety, this project would be perfect for using https://coalton-lang.github.io/ so your REPL supported Common Lisp out of the gate.

Agree that you can use types to express and prove logical properties via compiler; it can be a fun way to solve a problem though too much of it tends to frustrate coworkers. It's also not exactly "low cost"; here's an old quip I have in my quotes file:

"With Scala you feel smart having just got something to work in a beautiful way but when you look around the room to tell your clojure colleague how clever you are, you notice he left 3 hours ago and there is a post-it saying use a Map." --Daniel Worthington-Bodart

> On the contrary, they're still the most effective technique we've found for improving program correctness at low cost.

This is not borne out by research, such as there is any of any quality: https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ The best intervention to improve correctness, if not already being done, is code review: https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1120495752969641986 This doesn't necessarily mean dynamic types are better, just that if static types are better, they aren't tremendously so to obviously show in studies, unlike code review benefit studies.

My own bias is in favor of dynamic types, though I think the way Common Lisp does it is a lot better than Python (plus Lisp is flexible enough in other ways to let static type enthusiasts have their cake and eat it too https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton), and Python better than PHP, and PHP better than JS. Just like not all static type systems are C, not all dynamic type systems are JS. Untyped langs like assembly or Forth are interesting but I don't have enough experience.

I don't find the argument that valuable though, since I think just focusing on dynamic vs static is one of the least interesting division points when comparing languages or practices, and if we're trading experience takes I think Clojure's immutable-by-default prevents more bugs than any statically typed language that is mutable by default. It's not exactly a low cost intervention though, and when you really need to optimize you'll be encouraged by the profiler to replace some things with Java native arrays and so on. I don't think changing to static types would make a quality difference (especially when things like spec exist to get many of the same or more benefits) and would also not be a low cost intervention.

Last quip to reflect on. "What's true of every bug found in the field? ... It passed the type checker. ... It passed all the tests. Okay. So now what do you do? Right? I think we're in this world I'd like to call guardrail programming. Right? It's really sad. We're like: I can make change because I have tests. Who does that? Who drives their car around banging against the guardrail saying, "Whoa! I'm glad I've got these guardrails because I'd never make it to the show on time."" --Rich Hickey (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/)

Coalton seems great, I love the idea. This issue seems problematic, though: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/issues/84

> Lisps can be very flexible, but they usually lack static type safety, opening a wide and horrible door to run-time errors.

People should do basic research before writing something silly like this. Qualifying your statement with 'usually' is just a chicken sh*t approach. Common Lisp and Racket have optional strong typing, leaving the responsibility and choice to the developer. Common Lisp is great for implementing compilers. You also have thing like Typed Racket and Coalton. The latter is comletely statically typed ala MLTON

https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton

Have you checked out Coalton? It allows static typing a la Haskell within Common Lisp. Fully interoperable with CL, including through SLIME etc.

I've not regretted using Common Lisp for large, professional projects. However, I started Coalton so that some parts of a Common Lisp project can have strong, static, strict types—reaping benefits of compile-time errors and increased efficiency when I need it, without having to rewrite everything.

Neat. Thanks for sharing!

Interestingly, may-minihttp is faring very well in the TechEmpower benchmark [1], for whatever those benchmarks are worth. The code is also surprisingly straightforward [2].

[1] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

[2] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...

ntex was formed after a schism in actix-web and Rust safety/unsafety, with ntex allowing more unsafe code for better performance.

ntex is at the top of the TechEmpower benchmarks, although those benchmarks are not apples-to-apples since each uses its own tricks: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s...

Ruby is slow. Very slow. How much you may ask? https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s... fastest Ruby entry is at 272th place. Sure, top entries tend to have questionable benchmark-golfing implementations, but it gives you a good primer on the overhead imposed by Ruby.

It is also not early 00s anymore, when you pick an interpreted language, you are not getting "better productivity and tooling". In fact, most interpreted languages lag behind other major languages significantly in the form of JS/TS, Python and Ruby suffering from different woes when it comes to package management and publishing. I would say only TS/JS manages to stand apart with being tolerable, and Python sometimes too by a virtue of its popularity and the amount of information out there whenever you need to troubleshoot.

If you liked Go but felt it being a too verbose to your liking, give .NET a try. I am advocating for it here on HN mostly for fun but it is, in fact, highly underappreciated, considered unsexy and boring while it's anything but after a complete change of trajectory in the last 3-5 years. It is actually the* stack people secretly want but simply don't know about because it is bundled together with Java in the public perception.

*productive CLI tooling, high performance, works well in a really wide range of workloads from low to high level, by far the best ORM across all languages and back-end framework that is easier to work with than Node.JS while consuming 0.1x resources

Although that seems to have improved in recent years.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=json§...

RoR and whatever C++ based web backend there is count as a valid comparison in my book. But comparing the languages itself is maybe a bit off.

On a side note, you can actually compare their performance here if you’re really curious. But take it with a grain of salt since these are synthetic benchmarks.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks

Most benchmarks you'll find essentially have someone's thumb on the scale (intentionally or unintentionally). Most people won't know the different languages well enough to create comparable implementations and if you let different people create the implementations, cheating happens. The TechEmpower benchmarks aren't bad, but many implementations put their thumb on the scale (https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks). For example, a lot of the Go implementations avoid the GC by pre-allocating/reusing structs or allocate arrays knowing how big they need to be in advance (despite that being against the rules). At some point, it becomes "how many features have you turned off." Some Go http routers (like fasthttp and those built off it like Atreugo and Fiber) aren't actually correct and a lot of people in the Go community discourage their use, but they certainly top the benchmarks. Gin and Echo are usually the ones that are well-respected in the Go community.

There is certainly a lot of speculation in Techempower benchmarks and top entries can utilize questionable techniques like simply writing a byte array literal to output stream instead of constructing a response, or (in the past) DB query coalescing to work around inherent limitations of the DB in case of Fortunes or DB quries.

And yet, the fastest Ruby entry is at 274th place while Rails is at 427th.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s...

oh what machine? with how many workers? doing what?

search for "node" on this page: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21

JustJS would like a word https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&tes...

In terms of RPS, this web service is more-or-less the fortunes benchmark in the techempower benchmarks, once the data hits the cache: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21

Or, at least, they would be after applying optimizations to them.

In short, both of these would serve more rps than you will likely ever need on even the lowest end virtual machines. The underlying API provider will probably cut you off from querying them before you run out of RPS.