bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

> what can you expect from a language that uses "+", the quintessential notation for commutative operations, for the (very non-commutative) operation of concatenation?

Is this any worse than using `+` for floating-point addition, which isn't even associative?

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

So, Envoy will be embedding WebAssembly alongside (or instead of) Lua?

Are other projects moving from Lua (or other embedded scripting languages) to WebAssembly? What are the benefits of compiling an extension to WASM rather than writing it in Lua?

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Thanks, that makes sense.

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

> It was released just as the PS2 was announced

I think that's the point. A lot of people bought a PS2 because it was also a DVD player (same with the PS3 and Blu-ray).

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Isn't code generation during parsing still common today? In particular, bytecode generation in interpreters (and JIT compilers) for scripting languages, e.g. Lua?

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

`range` is an example. Lack of support for overloading makes it harder to replicate its API in our own functions.

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Well, however the `range` function is implemented, IMO its API would be better expressed as true overloading - as two functions with the same name.

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

If all we do is write Pythonic code (especially now that "Pythonic" seems to include type hints), what's the benefit of the highly dynamic CPython virtual machine?

Surely a faster VM, or even an ahead-of-time compiler, would be possible if we give up on some dynamism? Is that a direction the community should take?

(I think Guido's answer would be no, based on his apparent dislike of existing "Python compiler" projects such as Nuitka.)

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

`range(stop)` and `range(1, stop)` are both supported, but without overloading, the implementation of `range` is messy as it has to work out the meaning of each argument manually.

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

That's the thing - it's documented as overloaded, because that's the most intuitive explanation. Wren would allow it to actually be implemented as an overloaded function.

Python doesn't support overloading, and it doesn't support optional arguments before required ones, so the actual implementation in Python is a bit messy - something like:

  def range(start_or_stop, optional_stop=None):
      if optional_stop is None:
          start = 0
          stop = start_or_stop
      else:
          start = start_or_stop
          stop = optional_stop
      ...

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

The Wren scripting language supports this kind of "overloading by arity" [0].

Wren therefore allows overloads such as `range(stop)` and `range(start, stop)`. This is more intuitive than Python's `range(start=0, stop)`, which might be the only function in the language that has an optional parameter before a required one.

[0] http://wren.io/method-calls.html

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

"Distances longer than a few kilometers are measured in miles" was a direct reference to the OP's "yards to measure distances shorter than a few kilometers".

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I think Jedd was commenting on the spelling of "meter" vs "metre".

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

The UK doesn't use the metric system for distances, at least when talking about travel. The only switching is from yards to miles.

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

That shouldn't be surprising. Distances longer than a few kilometers are measured in miles.

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

> an engineer in silicon valley

Good point. The biggest factor that determines an engineer's salary is location, followed by years of experience. Not whether they work on compilers/embedded/web/whatever.

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

From GitHub [1]:

  "Plans to try MIR light-weight JIT first for CRuby or/and MRuby implementation"
  "MIR is strongly typed"

Is there an explanation of how the project bridges the gap between dynamically-typed Ruby and statically-typed MIR?

More generally, I'd love to see something like MRuby+MIR be successful. It would be great to see an alternative to the aging LuaJIT.

[1] https://github.com/vnmakarov/mir

bakery2k

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I wonder if it's similar to embedded software development (which also requires "rigorous working methods"). Salaries for embedded are generally lower than for web development because there's much less demand for embedded skills.

bakery2k

7 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

In a language like Python that encourages duck typing, type hints can become extremely complex [1] and can get in the way of the ideal of "executable pseudocode" [2].

[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2015-April/1392...

[2] https://twitter.com/dabeaz/status/981832805540909056

bakery2k

7 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Spot on. Static typing has benefits, but it also has a cost. Python's optional type hints have all the complexity but only some of the benefits - in my experience, runtime type errors are still common.

> To me it feels like python is running as far away from simplicity as fast as possible.

Despite its reputation, Python hasn't been a simple language for a long time.

Submissions

Lua and Python

Guido van Rossum Exits Python Steering Council

Hashmaps Benchmarks – Finding the Fastest, Memory Efficient Hashmap

Ask HN: Any experience with Python-in-the-browser (Python-to-JavaScript) tools?

comments