ivy VS go

My recent exposure to array programming languages came via a podcast called The Array Cast[1]

Not affiliated, just recommending. The regular co-hosts appear to each be experienced with various array languages such as J, APL, etc. They don't get deeply technical, but it's a nice introduction, especially on explaining the appeal.

A recent episode had Rob Pike (UTF-8, Go, etc.) on to talk about his array based calculator, Ivy[2]

[1] https://www.arraycast.com/

[2] https://github.com/robpike/ivy

I enjoyed russ cox's advent of code series using rob pike's ivy (https://github.com/robpike/ivy), an apl-like calculator

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrwpzH1_9ufMLOB6BAdzO...

Ivy is an APL-like programming language created by Rob Pike https://github.com/robpike/ivy

Ivy is another APL like language and one I kind of enjoy, because operations are actually readable and writable.

https://github.com/robpike/ivy

I really like Ivy as a simple, friendly introduction to APL. There is a surprising lack of APL-derived languages that use words to name things -- most stick with the original symbols; J and friends choose equally-cryptic symbols composed of ASCII characters.

Earlier this year I decided to solve AoC 2021 in Ivy, then watch Russ Cox's videos to see how he did it and use that to learn something about array programming -- a topic I knew absolutely nothing about going into this.

Unfortunately, Ivy really is, as Rob Pike says, a plaything. It is buggy -- if you ever write a function that returns a vector or a higher-rank array, you are entering bizarre undefined behavior territory. The array-language equivalent of "concat_map" or "flat_map" or "map-cat" or whatever you want to call it just produces garbage values, which is very confusing when you're learning about array programming for the first time ("Wait, this vector says its length is 25, but it contains 50 elements...?" or "The transpose of this array is just the first column repeated over and over??").

Beyond that, a very cool thing about array languages is that, you know, functions can implicitly act on entire arrays. You can multiple a vector by 2 and it will know to multiply every element in the vector by 2, because multiplication is defined for scalars.

But in Ivy, this is only true for the built-in functions. There is no way to write user-defined functions that have this implicit act-on-every-element behavior. Which is basically the looping primitive in array languages -- so to do anything nontrivial, you have to write it out with explicit recursion (still with the caveat that your functions can only return scalars, or you enter undefined behavior town) or rewrite your operations as binary operations with an ignored right-hand side and use "fold" to "map" them. It's bad.

The latter is crippling enough that Russ Cox [eventually forks Ivy](https://github.com/robpike/ivy/pull/83) to add support for it, but it is not currently part of the language.

Anyway that's a long comment to say: Ivy is a good, friendly introduction to APL syntax (stranding, precedence, etc) and some array language concepts, but it is far more of a calculator than a programming language.

But it's a good arbitrary-precision calculator! And if you're still interested in trying it, maybe check out this thing I made. It's an... Ivy programming environment?... that lets you run Ivy scripts and see the results inline. (Ivy's repl is... very primitive, and has to be wrapped by something like readline. Russ Cox uses 9term to get around this; self-modifying programs are my preferred approach.)

https://github.com/ianthehenry/privy

My frustration with Ivy led me to look into other array languages, trying to find one that 1) used English words instead of cryptic symbols and 2) worked. And I really couldn't find any! Someone should do something about that. :)

But your project is all about the command ytdial, so I think having a separate cmd directory is superfluous. Rob Pike also has project ivy which is laid out like this.

The description indicates it is not production ready, and is archived at the same time.

If you pull all stops in each respective language, C# will always end up winning at parsing text as it offers C structs, pointers, zero-cost interop, Rust-style struct generics, cross-platform SIMD API and simply has better compiler. You can win back some performance in Go by writing hot parts in Go's ASM dialect at much greater effort for a specific platform.

For example, Go has to resort to this https://github.com/golang/go/blob/4ed358b57efdad9ed710be7f4f... in order to efficiently scan memory, while in C# you write the following once and it compiles to all supported ISAs with their respective SIMD instructions for a given vector width: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/56e67a7aacb8a644cc6b8... (there is a lot of code because C# covers much wider range of scenarios and does not accept sacrificing performance in odd lengths and edge cases, which Go does).

Another example is computing CRC32: you have to write ASM for Go https://github.com/golang/go/blob/4ed358b57efdad9ed710be7f4f..., in C# you simply write standard vectorized routine once https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/56e67a7aacb8a644cc6b8... (its codegen is competitive with hand-intrinsified C++ code).

There is a lot more of this. Performance and low-level primitives to achieve it have been an area of focus of .NET for a long time, so it is disheartening to see one tenth of effort in Go to receive so much spotlight.

A Discussion about including this package in Go as encoding/json/v2 has been started on the Go Github project on 2023-10-05. Please provide your feedback there.

I like the Principles section. Very measured and practical approach to releasing new stdlib packages. https://go.dev/blog/randv2#principles

The end of the post they mention that an encoding/json/v2 package is in the works: https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/63397

There used to be the GO FIPS branch :

https://github.com/golang/go/tree/dev.boringcrypto/misc/bori...

But it looks dead.

And it looks like https://github.com/golang-fips/go as well.

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by acknowledgement, but here are some counterexamples:

- A proposal for sum types by a Go team member: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/57644

- The community proposal with some comments from the Go team: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19412

Here are some excerpts from the latest Go survey [1]:

- "The top responses in the closed-form were learning how to write Go effectively (15%) and the verbosity of error handling (13%)."

- "The most common response mentioned Go’s type system, and often asked specifically for enums, option types, or sum types in Go."

I think the problem is not the lack of will on the part of the Go team, but rather that these issues are not easy to fix in a way that fits the language and doesn't cause too many issues with backwards compatibility.

[1]: https://go.dev/blog/survey2024-h1-results

Now, I’m not going to use C++ again; I left that chapter years ago, and it’s not going to happen. C++ isn’t memory safe and easy to use and would require extended time for developers to adapt. Rust is the new kid on the block, but I’ve heard mixed opinions about its developer experience, and there aren’t many libraries around it yet. LLRD is too new for my taste, but **Go** caught my attention.

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