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gabcoh | 1 year ago

> async operations require a library to work for some reason

Rephrased: ocaml is so flexible that async can be implemented as a library with no special support from the language.

This is the beauty of ocaml (and strongly typed functional languages more broadly)

discuss

eru|1 year ago

> This is the beauty of ocaml (and strongly typed functional languages more broadly)

I don't think that's anything specific to strongly typed functional languages. In eg Rust even the standard library relies on third party crates.

Though it is still somewhat amusing to me that loops in Haskell are delivered via a third party library, if you ever actually want them. See https://hackage.haskell.org/package/monad-loops-0.4.3/docs/C...

I do agree that it's good language design, if you can deliver what would be core functionality via a library.

Whether you want to integrate that library into the standard library or not is an independent question of culture and convenience.

(Eg Python does quite well with its batteries-included approach, but if they had better dependency management, using third party libraries wouldn't be so bad. It works well in eg Rust and Haskell.)

koito17|1 year ago

As the other commenter pointed out, this isn't restricted to strongly-typed functional languages.

Clojure has core.async, which implements "goroutines" without any special support from the language. In fact, the `go` macro[1] is a compiler in disguise: transforming code into SSA form then constructing a state machine to deal with the "yield" points of async code. [2]

core.async runs on both Clojure and ClojureScript (i.e. both JVM and JavaScript). So in some sense, ClojureScript had something like Golang's concurrency well before ES6 was published.

[1] https://github.com/clojure/core.async/blob/master/src/main/c...

[2] https://github.com/clojure/core.async/blob/master/src/main/c...

Blackthorn|1 year ago

> something like Golang's concurrency

That's wildly overselling it. Closure core async was completely incapable of doing the one extremely important innovation that made goroutines powerful: blocking.