Comment by grayrest

7 hours ago

One of the primary goals for the Roc project is compiler speed. I presume OCaml is out of the running because it's not a systems language.

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grayrest

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satvikpendem  6 hours ago

OCaml compiler is incredibly fast. I wonder how it'd fare with Jane Street's extensions for the borrow checker etc in OxCaml, if it's good enough for their HFT I'm sure it's good enough for a new language.

  • djha-skin  6 hours ago

    I suspect this "not a systems language" alludes only to OCaml's rather steeper learning curve and until-recently difficulty with multiple threads. I am sure it could roll just fine as a single-threaded compiler language written by a small team, which indeed, it was.

  • antonvs  6 hours ago

    I wrote a toy Scheme implementation in OCaml by using the Camplp4 preprocessor. In benchmarks, it was faster than Gambit Scheme, which compiles through C.

steveklabnik  6 hours ago

OCaml has often historically been considered a language that's been appropriate to write systems tooling like compilers, runtimes, and unikernels in, even though GC'd languages were/are not often considered for such projects.

  • pjmlp  5 hours ago

    They are considered in many research labs since Xerox, unfortunately there are still too much anti-GC religion among mainstream devs.

    • sph  3 hours ago

      I don’t think there’s too many of us on the ‘GC did nothing wrong’ hill.

      Reading the average HN opinion, it seems everybody is writing high-performance latency-sensitive systems that would implode if a response would take 1 ms longer than normal.

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