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Comment by nanolith | Hacker News Reader

Haskell has a mature FFI. If there are any computational hurdles, it is possible to drop down to C/C++ to manage these. A good library can easily encapsulate this.

Of course, there is the point where such a library becomes a thin wrapper around an efficient numerical library written in C, but there are other advantages to Haskell that might make such a wrapper still worth the trade: an amazing type system, libraries that take advantage of this type system, and a compiler that generates fairly efficient code. If, in exchange for that, I have to marshal numerical data into and out of Haskell's FFI, I consider it a fair trade.

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Just to elaborate:

Even if all the computation were implmented in C (eg, DAG nodes in a TF style setup), being able to compose the network that forms the computation via Haskell would be a big win for me because it lets me use the type system and various powerful libraries to design my network. (And opens a straightforward path to GPU acceleration of Haskell designed code by using the C GPU libraries.)

Yeah this is basically how Python is used in ML/data science work. Except Haskell lets you apply solid engineering all the way from the prototype to the production system.

I've used Haskell a little. I understand the benefits of the type system from the perspective of something like a web app or libraries with abstractions. However, as someone who spends their days working on numerical code in Cython for research software, how would I actually leverage the type system in my numerical code? Would I ever leverage the power of the type system and define my own types?

It also seems like a terrible idea to use recursion to solve multidimensional array problems typically associated with loops and the indexing of those arrays.

Recursion is only a bad idea in languages with poor support for recursion, it's not difficult to write efficient Haskell code which produces good assembly with fairly obvious recursive algorithms. Optimisations like stream fusion and libraries like foldl also contribute to really good code generation (not guaranteed and also not generally applicable optimisations, but certainly helpful)

Does Haskell provide tail-call optimization or similar optimization to take away the stack-space costs of recursive function calls?

GHC can, if you want it to. It's hard to answer in a general way because of the laziness, and you can always force evaluation. But then you rob GHC of potentially better optimizations, like never executing it in the first place.

This SO does a good job of explaining the trade offs. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13042353/does-haskell-ha...

You generally use the Haskell type system to define the DAG associated with the computation you want to run, and the algorithms in terms of functions applied to those DAG nodes. Since the whole DAG is naturally thought of as a big function composed of many small functions applied to slices of (intermediate) data, you can leverage higher order functions in the construction of the DAG around implementations of the numerical code written in, say, C or FORTRAN. This is actually how a lot of numerics in Python is done (or at least was, the last time I looked in to it heavily).

You'd use the FFI to call out to something like C to actually execute the tensor operation, much like the TF design, where you're constructing a DAG in Python of the dataflow through tensors, which have their implementations in another language.

The type system just gives you a powerful way to reason about the structure of your DAG, define higher level abstractions (eg, autoimplementing certain kinds of networks against a certain input type), or discuss the feedback of the system during training, since training is just a higher order function that takes the entire DAG function as input and returns a new DAG. (Okay, for performance reasons you generally update values, but you can model that easily enough in Haskell.)

So really, basically the same way Python for numerics -- calling C for number crunching and doing algorithm designing in the higher level language.

You don't have to marshal. You can use the inline-c package to wrap all that up for you.

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