On Tuesday, 28 January 2020 at 14:01:35 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
Robert Schadek was inspired by a post he saw on Hacker News a while back showing an implementation of wc in Haskell totaling 80 lines.
I enjoyed the article overall, but I think this part lets it down a bit:
Is the Haskell wc faster? For big files, absolutely, but then it is using threads. For small files, GNU’s coreutils still beats the competition. At this stage my version is very likely IO bound, and it’s fast enough anyway.
Admit it, "my version is very likely IO bound" is hand-wavey. The top comment on HN right now is pointing out that it doesn't make sense.
It would be a better tech article if it stuck to the facts by either cutting out the hand-wavey bit (and just saying "it's fast enough anyway") or doing a test. (Quick and dirty way: running the code on a large file and seeing if it maxes out a CPU using the "top" command. More elegant way: using tools like these https://github.com/sysstat/sysstat/) Remember: plenty of us on the forums are happy to help make a D article more interesting.
