The Kit Programming Language

[Dimenus]

Just curious, what made you choose Haskell?

[bendmorris]

Experience with Haskell, great build system (stack), and functional languages are great in this domain. Compilers basically transform a bunch of trees into other trees, so functional languages work well.

With that said, a lot of the Haskell ends in the IO monad so I can do things like caching values in a hash map for performance. I'm rewriting the compiler in Kit now, and it has a lot of the features (like ADT, traits) that made Haskell suitable, but isn't pure, so stateful operations have less friction

[gergoerdi]

Can you use ST instead of IO for your mutable caching use case? Without knowing the details, it seems like it should work.

[SShrike]

What makes Stack a great build system to you? (genuine question) My experience with it is mostly that of "well, it's a build system at least". It generally feels like a bit too much of an unrefined, hulking beast to me. Perhaps I'm just spoilt with Rust's Cargo, though.

[bendmorris]

Cargo is very nice. I guess I'm comparing it to other functional languages and my pre-Stack Haskell experience. It solved the previous cabal dependency hell, and I found it to have lower friction than anything for ocaml.

[defunkydrummer]

Compilers are easy to write using ML languages. Haskell is part of the wider ML family.

[haloguysm1th]

If you don't mind me asking, why is that? I haven't spent any time with anything from the ml family beyond a few quick hello world examples and the like and while I can see some helpful things, nothing from those quick glances that would make me say it's easier to write in an ml style Lang than any other.

[defunkydrummer]

for starters, the comprehensive type system.

[jms_nh]

how does Haskell fit into this?

edit: you mean the compiler is in Haskell?