mlton
tao
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mlton | tao | |
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9 | 11 | |
916 | 1,068 | |
1.2% | - | |
8.3 | 7.7 | |
20 days ago | 7 months ago | |
Standard ML | Rust | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | Mozilla Public License 2.0 |
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mlton
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Flunct: Well-typed, fluent APIs in SML
https://github.com/MLton/mlton/issues/473
Is there sufficient use of MLTon "native" backend out there to consider it mature? or Do people prefer the LLVM or C backend instead in general?
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Simple JSON parser in c++, rust, ocaml, standard ml
Once I got the parser ready in OCaml, I thought I port it to Standard ML, since it belong to the same ML language family. I was also curious on how well mlton could optimise it. The language lacks custom let bindings, so I resorted to use Result.bind manually. This makes code much less readable and more verbose. The standard library also lacks result type, so I had to come up with my own simple implementation. There's also a lack of any hash map in the standard library, so I just used a list of key-value pairs. This isn't correct, but it's the closest I could get without inventing my own hash map. MLton's compile times are slow. It also lacks interactive REPL. Because of that I used alternative Standard ML implementation for interactive usage: PolyML. Debugging MLton binaries is also pretty hard. gdb doesn't work and there's no bundled debugger. I had to resort to debugging facilities built into PolyML. Valgrind doesn't work with mlton binaries, as it doesn't report any memory allocations. Looks like mlton uses mmap for allocation memory. Surprisingly, performance is not the best. This might be due to heavy usage of my custom Result type and bind calls. Exceptions seem to be a more natural choice for error reporting in Standard ML. I tried to make such a change, but this didn't improve the performance much.
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old languages compilers
MLton
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Modules: Overcoming Stockholm and Duning-Kruger
Something I’d highly recommend you do before concluding that SML’s module system is the best is to go through and read the MLton Basis library. MLton uses the module system extremely heavily in its definition of the standard, and I think it’s extremely important to understand what you may be getting yourself into when you add those features, and what you may lose in return.
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Ante: A low-level functional language
If you’re fine with tracing GC (which depends on the situation, of course), Standard ML is a perfectly boring language (that IIUC predated and inspired Caml) and MLton[1] is a very nice optimizing compiler for it. The language is awkward at times (in particular, the separate sublanguage of modules can be downright unwieldy), and the library has some of the usual blind spots such as nonexistent Unicode support (well, not every language WG is allocated a John Cowan).
Speaking of, Scheme can also be a delightful unexciting static language; consider for example the C-producing implementation Chicken[2]. The pattern-matching / algebraic-datatype story was still rather unsatisfying last I checked, but there are other situations where it shines—it’s complementary to SML in a way.
You’re not going to be writing a kernel or a real-time renderer in either (though I’m certain people have taken that as a challenge), they son’t afford the flashy EDSLs of Tcl, Ruby, or Racket, and I can’t say I can prototype in them like I do in Python or sh+tools, but there is a comfortable middle ground where they fit well. (I hear others use Go in what seem like the same places, but to me it feels so thin and devoid of joy that I can’t really compare.)
The FFI tools in both of the mentioned implementations are excellent, though not quite at the “type in C declarations” level of LuaJIT and D.
[1] http://mlton.org/
[2] https://call-cc.org/
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Write your own programming language in an hour with Chumsky
Unfortunately, I haven't found a ton of "easily-digestible" and, at the same time, comprehensive guides on compiling functional languages. Generally you'll find a mix of blog posts/class notes/papers covering a single step.
Some resources I like:
- Andrew Kennedy's 2007 paper Compiling with Continuations, Continued [1]. This one is the most clear IMO
- Andrew Appel's Compiling with Continuations book (a bit outdated though... assembly code is for VAX)
- Matt Might's series [2]
- MLton's source and documentation [3]
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
[2] https://matt.might.net/articles/closure-conversion/
[3] http://mlton.org/
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Why are imperative programs considered faster than their functional counterparts?
More broadly, they can be fast even without such extensions if they aggressively pursue optimization opportunities afforded by static typing, like MLton for example, but that also impacts compilation performance negatively.
- Coalton: How to Have Our (Typed) Cake and (Safely) Eat It Too, in Common Lisp
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Are there any efficient key-value map/dictionary implementations in SML?
https://github.com/MLton/mlton/blob/master/lib/mlton/basic/hash-set.sig https://github.com/MLton/mlton/blob/master/lib/mlton/basic/hash-table.sig
tao
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What backwards-incompatible changes would you make in a hypothetical Rust 2.0?
If you want some prior work on this, I've implemented effect-objects-as-return-values in my own language Tao, using uniqueness types. There's still work to be done, but I think it's sufficient as a proof of concept that this approach is viable without type soup.
- Why does Rust have parameters on impl?
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What are Rust’s biggest weaknesses?
I've personally found through my experiments working on my language Tao that having effects be a property of the return value and not the function itself is very useful and opens up a lot of doors, like iterators that generate effectful values and more precise control over when side effects occur and in what context.
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Hey Rustaceans! Got a question? Ask here! (29/2022)!
If you’d like to see some examples of great error messages written by a language with a parser combinator, I recommend you check out tao, which is parsed via chumsky, and provides rust-like error messages with the help of ariadne! I have been fiddling with writing my own language for a while now, and after trying out the alternatives, I found Chumsky to be great to work with, and can not recommend it enough. There are also great examples that you can find in the repo as well!
- Tao: A statically-typed functional language
- Tao: 一种静态类型的函数式语言 (Tao: A statically-typed functional language)
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Hacker News top posts: Jul 5, 2022
Tao: A statically-typed functional language\ (0 comments)
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Write your own programming language in an hour with Chumsky
I've been developing both throughout the development of Tao, my own hobby language. It's since developed quite an extensive syntax (see here for an example: https://github.com/zesterer/tao/blob/master/examples/99.tao), so you can count it as evidence that chumsky scales to complex grammars: https://github.com/zesterer/tao
What are some alternatives?
LunarML - The Standard ML compiler that produces Lua/JavaScript
statix - lints and suggestions for the nix programming language
typed-racket - Typed Racket
tauri - Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.
seL4 - The seL4 microkernel
pom - PEG parser combinators using operator overloading without macros.
sml-parseq - parallel sequences library in Standard ML
owo - Export your OneNote note collection to Obsidian, Logseq, Org Mode or any other plain text note-taking app! [Moved to: https://github.com/alopezrivera/OneNoteExporter]
smlfmt - A custom parser/auto-formatter for Standard ML
chumsky - Write expressive, high-performance parsers with ease.
futhark - :boom::computer::boom: A data-parallel functional programming language
bril - an educational compiler intermediate representation