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Comment by LightMachine

2 years ago

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.