Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> .NET has both of them

I'll give you value types, but reified generics in .NET were a mistake. It really makes interop and code sharing among languages hard, in exchange for a rather slight added convenience. This means that if you're a language implementor and you're targeting .NET, you'll get much less from the platform than you would if you target Java, which makes .NET not a very appealing common language runtime. And not only is Java a good platform for Kotlin and Clojure, but thanks to Truffle/Graal it's becoming a very attractive, and highly competitive, platform for Ruby, Python and JavaScript. All of that would have been much more difficult with reified generics.

Also, I don't think value types in Java are being "pushed back." The team is investing a lot of work into them as it's a huge project, but AFAIK no timeline has been announced.

> and also has the same core strengths JVM does

I don't think so. Its compilers are not as good, its GCs are not nearly as good, and its production profiling is certainly not as good (have you seen what JFR can do?); and its tooling and ecosystem are not even in the same ballpark.

I see it as a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, reified generics means that it's .NET's object model or the highway.

On the other hand, .NET maintains a much higher standard of inter-language interoperability. When I was on .NET, I didn't have to worry much about the folks working in F# accidentally rendering their module unusable from C#. Now that I'm on the JVM, I've accepted that it's just a given that the dependency arrows between the Java and Scala modules should only ever point in one direction.

It's not .NET vs Java so much that the development of the two languages you mention are coordinated. For Kotlin and Clojure interop works both ways; Scala doesn't care much about that, so Scala developers write special facades as Java language API. There are lots of different languages on Java, and they care about different things. The Java team itself develops only one language, although at one time there was another (JavaFX Script). Some language developers (Kotlin, JRuby) work more closely with the Java team, and others (Scala) hardly ever do.

Dumb question. Why do reified generics make interop challenging? Or is it reified generics plus value types that don't inherit system.Object? Couldn't the language implementations basically pass around ICollection<Object> in .NET somewhat similar to how they do in Java?

The problem is that your GenericClass<T1> and GenericClass<T2> are really more like GenericClass_T1 and GenericClass_T2 with their own distinct type definitions and interfaces. From the perspective of a different runtime/language trying to interop with these types, you have to somehow understand and work with this mapping game. It's much easier from inside the .NET runtime than outside.

The general solution is, like you suggested, to avoid using reified generics in the module interface where the interop happens.

The solution I remember from the last time I dealt with Python on .NET (which was admittedly a long time ago) was the opposite - you did use the reified generics, and there were facilities to create an instance of GenericClass<TWhatever> from within Python. There's a whole dynamic language runtime that is purpose-built for smoothing over a lot of that stuff.

What wouldn't work would be to, e.g., create a Python-native list and try to pass it into a function that expects a .NET IList<T>. Which doesn't feel that odd to me - they may have the same name, but otherwise they're very different types that have very different interfaces.

That said, the Iron languages never took off. My personal story there is that all the new dynamic features that C# got with the release of the DLR pretty much killed my desire to interact with C# from a dynamic language. The release that gave me Python on .NET also turned C# itself into an acceptable enough Python for my needs.

> Why do reified generics make interop challenging?

Suppose you have types A and B, such that A <: B. What is, then, the relationship between List<A> and List<B>? This question is called variance, and different languages have very different answers to this, but once generics are reified, the chosen variance strategy is baked into the runtime.

> Couldn't the language implementations basically pass around ICollection<Object> in .NET somewhat similar to how they do in Java?

They could, but then this adds significant runtime overhead at the interop layer. For example, a popular standard API may take a parameter of type List<int>. How do you then call it from, say, JavaScript, without an O(n) operation (and without changing JS)?

> This question is called variance, and different languages have very different answers to this, but once generics are reified, the chosen variance strategy is baked into the runtime.

Which, realistically, is probably the only principled way to do things if you want to be doing much with variant generics in a cross-language way.

The Java way, "I pick my variance strategy, you pick yours, and we'll both pass everything around as a List<Object> at runtime and just hope that our varying decisions about what their actual contents are allowed to be never cause us any nasty surprises for each other at run time," is not type-safe and can lead to nasty surprises at run time. It's easier, sure, but easier is not necessarily better.

Except, realistically, of all the polyglot runtimes, the ones that have good interop erase and the one that doesn't reifies.

.NET Value types do inherit from System.Object.

See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.valuetype...

Is a value type different from a value class?

https://github.com/google/auto/blob/master/value/userguide/i...

Yes, those value classes are still heap/GC allocated objects.

Value types are a generalisation of `int`, `long`, `float` (etc), where values are stored inline, not allocated on the heap. For instance, a `Pair<long, double>` that isn't a pointer, but is instead the exactly the size of a long plus a double, and is the same as writing `long first; double second;` inline.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com