[nem-en] loving Nemerle

[Michal Moskal]

On 10/26/05, Greg Fitzgerald <garious at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Do you feel that performance side of the language fulfilled your expectations?
>
> The compiler is definitely very slow by comparison to C/C++ compilers
> I've used.  I haven't compared it to any languages with type inference
> though.
>
> What I find odd is that compiling a 'Hello World' takes a second or
> two, and compiling a 2000 LOC program utilizing type inference
> everywhere  doesn't take much longer.

This is because the compiler is processed by the JIT. You can try to
speed this up by using (ms.net) ngen or mono --aot. Be however warned
that under mono, with big sources the compiler is actually SLOWER with
aot.

> > Unfortunately OCaml's syntax and lack of libraries prevented me from
> > doing any real programming there. And here we come to Nemerle :-)
>
> OCaml's libraries aren't too bad if you grew up in the POSIX world,
> but they are definitely not as intuitive as .NET.

It depends what you want to do. There are some problems with GUI
building under OCaml. OTOH there is magnitude of EVERYTHING for .NET.

> The main thing that
> turned me off OCaml is the lack of built in Unicode support.

Yeah, this is also a problem.

> Sure would be nice if currying were as easy in Nemerle as OCaml or
> Haskell.  I find that the source of most of my bugs is in maintaining
> state within classes.  I try to clean things up by currying state
> through the system, which isn't impossible in Nemerle, but it's not so
> easy that doing so just becomes a 'way of life' like in OCaml.

Could you please post some examples, how you do it in Nemerle? We
could then try to figure out how to improve it.

> > Sadly, we are not too far in Nemerle with regard to IDE support.
>
> Auto-completion sure drops the learning curve for a new set of
> libraries, and a debugger would be so very useful.  How do you guys
> debug?

I personally use printf :-)

Under Windows the builtin .NET debugger should work, you just need to
pass -g to ncc. Under mono, if the debugger happens to work for C#, it
also should for Nemerle (there are still some problems with running it
in general).

--
   Michal Moskal,
   http://nemerle.org/~malekith/