anilmvs
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2015–2023
1:07:28 · 7.2K views · Mar 27, 2012
Lennart Augustsson's CUFP 2011 keynote covers using Haskell commercially at Standard Chartered Bank. He discusses non-standard Haskell implementations, including a strict dialect, and weighs strict against lazy evaluation.
It is the reference for Mu, Standard Chartered's strict Haskell, and for the practical case that strictness makes debugging easier.
4 comments from Hacker News
I mean, if you want a direct quote from Lennart Augustsson, here's a quick transcription of the relevant parts of the relevant video. this video > So strictness is really fantastic, I must say. Stack traces work. When something goes wrong, you can say "so you call things from there to there to there". It's the single most time saving thing from Mu compared to Haskell, because things do go wrong from now and then, and it's so great to know exactly what went wrong... And strict languages have what I call resource composition. So if you understand the complexity of 2 parts you can stick them together and nothing weird happens. They add up. That's not true in lazy languages. And debugging, it's sensible in strict languages. And exceptions, they actually work! Strictness is great. It's terrible, also. So it has nice resource composition but it doesn't compose nicely semantically. So laziness has some good things as well. I think laziness is a much nicer way of programming except for these pesky resources. You definitely need some lazy functions, even C has lazy functions. And then he goes on to talk about the ways that they allow laziness in a strict language, and when they need laziness. Screenshots of relevant slides. Considering that the report was pretty much a summary of the talks given at CUFP, I don't know why you would cast doubt on its legitimacy. [LINK] [LINK]
> their own dialect of Haskell called Mu. [emphasis mine] >Mu has a strict runtime, which makes program performance easier to analyse and predict – but prevents us from just copy-pasting some Haskell libraries that rely crucially on lazy evaluation. [emphasis mine] If Mu were an entirely different language then you wouldn't be able to copy-paste any Haskell libraries. See also e.g. here: [LINK] , this video
While it's not publicly available, there is a strict dialect of Haskell called Mu, owned by Standard Chartered. See this video . It would be nice if the rest of us could play with it, but so it goes.
IIRC, Standard Chartered achieved this by initially adding Haskell interop to Excel[0] and then moving to a custom GUI solution to replace Excel altogether. [0]- this video