Subj : Re: OO compilers and efficiency
To   : comp.programming
From : Scott Moore
Date : Tue Jul 26 2005 11:50 am



Jon Harrop wrote:
> Scott Moore wrote:
> 
>>Jon Harrop wrote:
>>
>>>The poor performance of Java relative to OCaml just goes to show that
>>>having hundreds of compiler-writers in big business is not as good as
>>>having a single good language designer.
>>
>>You all have been giving OCaml a lot of press here. Whats good about it? A
>>look at Wakypedia shows that it needs lots of odd puncuation and "let",
>>which I thought went out with Basic. Plus the example is clearly for an 
>>interpreter (it has a shell specifier at the top). Why don't you tell us
>>what makes OCaml so much better, instead of just repeating it like a
>>mantra ?
> 
> 
> Sure. I have already published quite a bit of information on this for free
> on the web. For hackers familiar with other languages, it is instructive to
> start with some interesting programs written in OCaml in order to see how
> concise OCaml code is.
> 
> I wrote a little maze generation program in OCaml which renders its result
> using OpenGL and outputs PostScript:
> 
>   http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/maze/index.html
> 
> The following web page describes a simple OCaml ray tracer of mine which
> visualises the result using OpenGL:
> 
>   http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/ray_tracer/
> 
> I cut this ray tracer down to a 57-line OCaml program which implements the
> main parts (e.g. hierarchical spherical bounding volumes) in order to
> compare equivalent implementations in different languages. The following
> pages discuss four progressively more optimised implementations in C++,
> Java, OCaml and SML:
> 
>   http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/ray_tracer/comparison.html
>   http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/ray_tracer/comparison_cpp_vs_sml.html
>   http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/ray_tracer/languages.html
> 
> I have written a book called "Objective CAML for Scientists" which discusses
> the benefits of OCaml in the context of scientific computing:
> 
>   http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/
> 
> Several parts of the book are freely available on-line including the whole
> of the first chapter, OpenGL examples:
> 
>   http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/visualisation
> 
> and complete example programs:
> 
>   http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/complete
> 
> Another useful source of OCaml code is the shootout:
> 
>   http://shootout.alioth.debian.org
> 
> From the shootout, OCaml is clearly an unusually concise, high-performance
> language.
> 
> In summary, I'd list the following positive attributes of OCaml code:
> 
> 1. Robustness (particularly static type checking)
> 2. Brevity (particularly type inference)
> 3. Speed
> 4. Portability
> 5. Simplicity
> 6. Compatible byte-code and native-code compilers
> 7. Functional or imperative
> 8. Easy-to-use lexing and parsing tools
> 
> If you'd like to select which of those benefit you the most then I can go
> into more detail. For example, do you already know what functional
> programming is and why it is useful?
> 

Yes, its not supposed to have if then else, right ? Formulas for everything ?

.