On Thursday 24 April 2008 21:15:54 Ola Bini wrote: > Jon Harrop wrote: > > On Thursday 24 April 2008 19:23:31 Ola Bini wrote: > >> Hmm. Tell me what the JVM misses that .NET has with regards to OCaml and > >> F#. Because I really can't figure out what it would be. > > > > Tail calls has to be the single biggest omission. There are others like > > first-class functions and custom value types. > > I totally agree about tail calls. Of course, F# doesn't use the .NET > tail calls because they are implemented so badly.
I don't know what gave you that impression but it is completely wrong. F# relies upon the CLR's tail call implementation. > So this is no real difference between the JVM and .NET. The JVM doesn't provide any of these basic features. > Also, first class functions. This area I'm hazy on, but doesn't C# just > synthesize them into class implementations, just like the Java proposals > for closures will do? Which of the Java proposals are you referring to? > Delegates definitely doesn't have any real VM support. They require support in the core library otherwise you cannot pass delegates between languages. > Of course, the JVM has lots of things that are missing from > .NET, including a very advanced hotspot engine with both selective > optimization and deoptimization. Even if you restrict benchmarking to what little the JVM supports, it is still not significantly faster. If you have to include workarounds for missing features like tail calls then it will certainly be vastly slower. > >> Also, stating the compellability of OCaml/F# over Lisp/Scheme is > >> something I'm definitely against. (I'm against the converse too, of > >> course) > > > > I mean the examples for OCaml/F# seem a lot more compelling to me (e.g. > > MATLAB, Windows, Halo 3, MSN Live). Perhaps that is just my perspective. > > YMMV. > > Yeah. My mileage does wary. OCaml is nice in some circumstances, Common > Lisp and Scheme in others. I've enough of both that I can't declare any > of them superior to the other. Not really. Regardless, anyone trying to make a case for functional programming in industry would be much better off citing major existing commercial examples like the ones I listed. I'd be amazed if people hadn't already heard about the work Microsoft is doing though. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "JVM Languages" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/jvm-languages?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
