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Comment by fnord123 | Hacker News Reader

I think big here means impactful.

Describing two well-engineered compilers of two relatively used languages as not impactful is quite a statement. In particular, given the good performance results they achieve, for languages that are quite far away from the normal execution model of the machine they produce code for.

>two relatively used languages

Relative to what? Haskell and OCaml are important languages for PLT but not in the context of "production", or as I understood "production" to mean: shipping products with features. To call them anything but niche players in this context is not accurate in my opinion.

As in, there are a handful of large projects the languages are used for. For Haskell, Facebook's spam detection system, Sigma[1], comes to mind, along with some use by banks (Standard Chartered); then there's a bunch of smaller places using Haskell (Wire, a secure messaging app, like Signal; Galois, a US defense contractor doing software verification and related things) plus some open-source tools like pandoc.

I know less about OCaml, but at least Jane Street is using it.

It's somewhat niche, but it's not like it's only used for hobby or toy applications.

[1] https://code.fb.com/security/fighting-spam-with-haskell/

Facebook's static analyzer Infer https://fbinfer.com is written in OCaml.

There's a lot of OCaml in the program verification space: https://frama-c.com http://why3.lri.fr https://alt-ergo.ocamlpro.com

And for mysterious reasons, OCaml is now kinda popular for.. web frontends. Bloomberg created an OCaml-to-JS compiler https://bucklescript.github.io and Facebook (again!) created an alternative syntax https://reasonml.github.io and this combination is apparently a new hipster way of writing web apps.

I don't think language use industry-wide is a good metric for how relevant compiler software is. It is entirely imaginable that a very serious compiler that proves the original point exist for a language with very rare industry use.

Another point is that Haskell and OCaml popularized features and styles that are making their way into mainstream languages (e.g. option types instead of null, immutability by default), and the compilers showed that they can be implemented efficiently.

Both GHC and ocaml have a pretty good claim at being among the most influential compilers of their generation.

If you look at Java for instance, generics were made by one of the Haskell creators, and it has been implementing functional features for years now.

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