[6gvONxR4sf7o]

I’ve never heard of Koka before (one of its stated predecessors), but Koka seems really intriguing. Has anyone used it?

[anfelor]

Yes, I am currently writing a masters thesis about it! It is a "research language that [is] currently under heavy development" as the README says so I don't recommend using it for anything other than a research/toy project. But you would be surprised how well it works: Algebraic effects can give you 98% the power of monads while being much faster and easier to understand. And then Koka uses mimalloc [0], Perceus [1] and tail recursion modulo cons which make Koka programs almost as fast as C++. For example, in the benchmarksgame, Haskell takes 5x as much time on the binarytrees benchmark as the fastest implementation, while Koka is 50% slower (similar to other C/C++ and Rust implementations).

[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25464354

[igouy]

> Haskell takes 5x as much time … as the fastest implementation, while Koka is 50% slower (similar to other C/C++ and Rust implementations).

Which is to say Koka takes 2x as much time as the fastest for that task ?

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

Huh, now I'm curious whether it means 2x or 1.5x. These graphs on the github look promising https://github.com/koka-lang/koka/blob/master/doc/bench-amd3...

[grumpyprole]

That's pretty good considering Koka is a high-level language like Python and JavaScript.

[cies]

Super cool indeed. I learned MSFT pulled funding for this project. Sadly.

[anfelor]

No, that seems wrong. Its currently only Daan working on this, but as you can see the last commit to 'master' was 7 days ago and the last commit to 'dev' yesterday...

[cies]

So was there MSFT funding? And is there now MSFT funding?

That it gets continued as a hobby project does not mean it was not funded at some point (and is no longer).

But I'm not sure about my statement; no source also (just remember reading it).

CORRECTION: as can be read rest of the thread, Koka is being funded by MSFT.

[anfelor]

Daan is employed full-time at MS Research and gets to spend this time on Koka (when he is not writing conference papers). There is currently no further funding or deployment of Koka within Microsoft that I know of (unlike mimalloc which seems to be used by Azure and Bing).

[cies]

Thanks for setting this straight!