Hacker News Reader

Comment by copergi | Hacker News Reader

>Scala's type-system is much more static, leaving much less room for accidental bugs. Scala's compiler does things that in other languages you'd need to run specialized tools to get the same results or to write more tests

That is a bogus excuse. Languages with better type systems have faster compilers: haskell, clean, F# and especially ocaml. Paul Philips makes a pretty convincing argument that scalac is slow because it is a big mess.

View on HN

Haskel's compiler is much slower than Scala. Ocaml's compiler is also slow.

F#'s type system doesn't do higher kinded types, or type classes, amongst other being much less sophisticated.

I'm really tired of hearing the Paul Philips argument. Scala 2.11 is a big refactoring addressing many of his complaints. Will that stop people from using the Paul Philips argument in conversations? Of course not, as many people weren't interested in his actual arguments.

> Ocaml's compiler is also slow

Umm, no it isn't. I'm not sure I'm aware of a faster compiler. It's so fast most people don't even realise that they are running the byte code version (ocamlc) rather than the native code verison (ocamlc.opt).

GHC is faster than scalac, and GHC is the slowest haskell compiler. Ocaml optimizing compiler completely destroys scalac (and GHC), nevermind the bytecode compiler which is way faster than that. Being tired of reality doesn't change reality. When the single most knowledgeable person in the world on the internals of scalac talks about why scalac is slow, it is more likely that he is correct than some random scala fanboy on hn.

What everyone seems to miss about the Paul Philips talk is that he isn't leaving Scala. He's still active in the community contributing code.

He doesn't think the language is perfect (no one does) but he doesn't think any other existing language meets his standards either.

I never suggested he was leaving. I wasn't even referring to a talk he gave. I said he is easily the worlds foremost expert on scalac, and he does not think it is fast, or that it is slow because it has to do a lot of work other languages don't. He thinks it is slow because it needs to be re-written to not be a mess.

GHC can be freakishly slow, especially with -O which is needed and is on the whole a lot slower than scalac, yes. You can claim otherwise of course, but oh look, it even has bugs in it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17822539/debugging-compi...

I never dismissed Paul Philips' arguments. In case you missed my not-so-subtle critique, I'm complaining about people referring to his presentation as a tool for bashing Scala, without having listened to those arguments. What's a "mess" anyway? Scala-js.org happened in a fantastic time-frame because it reuses Scala's reference compiler. How many languages can claim such performance?

People are also working on fixing many of the problems raised by Paul Philips, with Scala 2.11 being a result of that work. And oh look, Paul Philips is still on the contributors list, amongst many others: http://scala-lang.org/news/2014/03/20/release-notes-2.11.0-R...

You're doing both an appeal to authority for an otherwise unconstructive criticism (yours, not Paul's) and an ad-hominen in absence of actual arguments. Also for a random fanboy, at least I'm putting a real name behind my 2016 days old account ;-)

>GHC can be freakishly slow

So can scalac. Many compilers have pathological performance cases. Just repeating "the sky is green" over and over won't make it so. It is well known and widely accepted that scalc is slower than ghc. You don't have to like it, or even accept it. But responding with nonsense strawman arguments as if I am bashing scala is pathetic even by hn standards. You made false claims, I pointed out that they are false. Quite simple.

>People are also working on fixing many of the problems raised by Paul Philips

Of course they are. Why do you think "people are fixing those problems" is evidence to support your claim that those problems don't exist?

Looks like the magic rule that no Scala thread is complete without a nut-job trying to bash and hate it has once again proven to be correct.

C'mon, "nut-job" was uncalled for.

Cry me a river. Try being a fan of Java on HN :o)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com