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Is OCaml fast?
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Thanassis Tsiodras
- Gregory Bellier
- Sylvain Le Gall
- Dario Teixeira
- Gerd Stolpmann
- Fabrice Le Fessant
- Oliver Bandel
- Isaac Gouy
- David Allsopp
- Cedric Cellier
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Vincent Aravantinos
-
Thanassis Tsiodras
- Oliver Bandel
- Vincent Aravantinos
-
Thanassis Tsiodras
- Isaac Gouy
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Date: | 2010-11-24 (16:34) |
From: | Vincent Aravantinos <vincent.aravantinos@g...> |
Subject: | Re: [Caml-list] Is OCaml fast? |
Le 24 nov. 10 à 16:30, Thanassis Tsiodras a écrit : > On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Vincent Aravantinos > <vincent.aravantinos@gmail.com> wrote: >> may we know, after all this intense discussion, what is your feeling? > > Well... (ducks, wears helmet). > > Dr Jon Harrop communicated with me directly (two days ago)... and when > I expressed my lack of faith after reading his "Rise and fall of > OCaml" article at > http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/rise-and-fall-of-ocaml.html > , he in fact counter-suggested that F# is now the horse to bet on - > so... what do you guys think? > > Over the last couple of days, I've played a lot with ocaml (to be > exact, Linux/ocamlopt, since my interest in the speed of what I make > remains dominant) as well as F# (with Visual Studio 2008). To my > limited understanding, the differences between OCaml and F# are small > - and the benefits of direct access to the .NET ecosystem of libraries > seems to counter the ... uncertain status of OCaml libraries. I just > begun looking into all this, so I could be very wrong, of course - but > I am spoiled rotten with Python's libraries, so not having "batteries > included" in OCaml seemed like quite a problem... until I realized F# > completely covers this. > > So, to conclude - what do you guys think about F# ? I personally do not know much of F#. Particularly because I do not have a Windows machine :( We all know here that Jon is very fond of F# after having been fond of Ocaml for a while. The socalled "Ocaml mass exodus" mentionned in Jon's article seems to me as as objective as the language shootout benchmarks ;) In particular the plot I made myself of the posts to the mailing list is definitely not as clear as the one presented in the article (you can do it yourself from the figures at <http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/index.fr.html >). Jon also mentions (in the comments) the figures from Google Trends about Ocaml vs F# (<http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q=f %23%2Cocaml>). But funnily enough, you can see from the excerpts selected by Google that F# deals as much with the language than with... ahem, other stuff. Furthermore the plot was already increasing before the release of F#, so is this increase really significative? My whole point here is not that Jon is wrong or right: maybe he is right, I just say that the supposed exodus does not seem significative to me. Anyhow I do not "feel" it. I would even say that I feel the contrary (and I am not the only one: see Paolo's comment in Jon's article). Then Jon suggests in his article that that this is due to the "inability of Ocaml's GC to [deal with parallelism]". Again, all of us here know that Jon has been quite frustratred with this for a while (and not only him, cf some very recent thread <http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2010/11/642bb03b01227d825e71b0a46ae7e73f.fr.html >). However there are also plenty of guys who are not bothered by this (see the very same thread). Choose your camp. On one hand, if you go to F# you won't have to choose. On the other hand, this does not make F# necessarily faster than Ocaml (as Jon himself proved it: <http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/pure-f-now-only-2-slower-than-ocaml.html >). Of course if you listen to Jon you will be convincend that you should choose F#. Many people here will probably react by saying that you should choose Ocaml. I am personnally neutral here: in the end, I would say that both languages are great (about F# I should say "look great" since I never tried it). So whatever is your final choice I guess you won't be disappointed. Cheers, Vincent PS: BTW about the complain in Jon's article about the lack of a native REPL in ocaml, I think this recent post also answers it very partly: <http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2010/11/aef35ed6ad039ce80c5c66175e80fcc5.fr.html >. Probably nothing compared, though, to the F# REPL (trusting Jon on that).