Comment by _a_a_a_
2 years ago
This seems very interesting, and I like your FAQ where you get honest, but your intro almost put me off:
"be up to exponentially faster than alternatives" – hmm
"Interaction Net, which supersedes the Turing Machine" – Interaction Net link points to a paper on Interaction Combinators. And talking about superseding Turing machines is embarrassing – do you have Oracle powers? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_machine)
"set to scale towards uncharted levels of performance" – that's just a bit cringy
I've come across claims of no GC needed and I don't buy it unless in restricted domains, and it would be nice to have a link towards what you mean by 'beta optimality'. I would like to see the sort benchmark being done something realistic (recursive bubble sort, the two words together don't look good). Also automatic parallelism..., Immutability apparently for free, everything higher-order, it seems you hit a lot of holy grails in one go. Rather too many for me to feel comfortable.
The FAQ by contrast is a whole lot more reasonable and upfront, perhaps be careful about overselling yourself?
I agree with most of your points, we should definitely rewrite and tone down the README. The FAQ was written a few months after, due to that kind of negative reception. To address your points, note that by "superseding" the Turing Machine, I do not mean they can compute uncomputable functions! The meaning is that, while both are equivalent in terms of *computability*, Interaction Nets have improved *computational* characteristics, such as strong confluence and concurrency. This is a very technical aspect that is addressed on the paper I linked. Regarding not buying the claim of no GC needed, this is interesting, since this is a well stablished result: HVM is entirely linear, so it can avoid global GCs for the same reason as Rust. The difference is that HVM is more inherently high level, since its support for lambda is way more first-class than Rust's closures, which are comparably slow and almost guarantee borrow-checker hell.
(Also, exponentially faster is used on the technical sense here! Optimal evaluators can reduce some programs with linear time complexity, while conventional runtimes are exponential.)