Tail-call optimization added to 6to5 compiler(github.com) |
Tail-call optimization added to 6to5 compiler(github.com) |
As someone chiefly interested in .js for it's 'functional curious' side, the new features in ES6 have me really excited.
But it does have a number of key basics in place. It has anonymous, first-class functions and objects. It has a very handy function composition syntax (chaining dot-notation feels almost like Haskell sometimes, if uglier). It has map(), filter(), and reduce(). You can, somewhat torturously, wrangle a Y-combinator in it even.
But in practice, it's still missing some basic toys. The lack of TCO means that while yes you have handy function composition and a basic smattering of first-class functions, recursive solutions aren't really viable, which makes many classic functional approaches impossible when it comes to implementing the stuff that isn't there yet. You have to kludge around it with mutation and for loops and such. As well, you also run into issues with the object-oriented focus at times: first-class functions are all well and good, but not that useful when so many things aren't functions but methods or operators, requiring even more heavy use of lambdas than I would in a Lisp.
ES6 goes further in the direction of supporting the functional style and making it more pleasant to write. Arrows offer neater lambda syntax, let and const offer better control of scope and enforced immutable variables, and of course offering proper TCO opens up a lot easier implementation of classic recursive functions. I'm even a little curious about the possibilities of iterators and generators; my experience implementing an RNG in Heresy using Racket's generators suggested that they can prove a powerful tool in the functional programmer's toolbox for solving certain kinds of problems traditionally thought to be quite non-trivial to write from a functional approach.
ES6 does come a little closer to actually living up to Crockford's hype with these changes. It's something I'm very excited to keep learning and playing with, and it was something of a relief to find a niche for the happy little Schemer in me in an otherwise very mainstream, mostly-imperative language.
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I'm not sure how 6to5, or any other transpiler, could do much better. The job these tools exist to do necessarily means they can't do better than what today's browsers' JS engines will support.
Presumably in due course browsers will provide ES6 natively and so be better able to optimise code that uses tail calls in this way. Still, it's important to realise that the 6to5 implementation is much slower, and more of a forward-compatible stepping stone if you need it than something to use routinely if you like a functional programming style.
I'm clocking a 110-215X performance boost: 1,255,700 - 2,384,556 ops/sec! (on Chrome and Firefox alpha builds respectively) Check out the new JSPerf: http://jsperf.com/tco/17
Recur provides an explicit form of support for the latter, but not the former.
Pattern-matching and guards are crazy useful.
I have to ask, though: what the tap-dancing Christ was the purpose of the new Symbol objects? They're completely alien to any other symbols implementation I've seen.
They aren't global by default, they don't compare equally to one another, and even the global ones can't really be used for, say, KV lookups in a global table. WTF?
I agree it's a somewhat confusing name, since interned symbols are the more familiar kind of symbol in other languages, especially in the modern era (older Lisps made more extensive use of uninterned symbols).
Thanks for the reference about CL make-symbol. Is there a practical use for this we actually would spot in the wild, or do I need to go up on the mountain with a copy of The Art of the Metaobject Protocol?
Clojure Conj 2012: http://youtu.be/RLqqGSthmC0
The grandparent commenter did say "Corecursion could (if awkwardly) be converted into ordinary recursion", which I would say is technically correct, which some say is the best kind of correct. (Perhaps he has a somewhat less awkward scheme in mind.)
I'm not sure if that qualifies as a practical use in the out in the wild or just a practical way to fix pain (e.g. CPP nonsense) that you can see out in the wild.
It's a small and simple code base, and much easier way to grok the concept than reading a book.
https://github.com/goatslacker/alt/blob/master/src/alt.js
They seem to be being used mostly as immutable constants for readability--which kind of fits with normal use, right? I'm just trying to see if there's anything else here I'm missing.