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Comment by hopia | Hacker News Reader

In terms of GHC's evolution, this looks really promising to me: http://www.well-typed.com/blog/2019/10/nonmoving-gc-merge/

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Yeah that is a monumental addition imo. You can find forum posts from just a few years ago with this on their wishlist. Cool to see it finally happen.

Have you tried this yet in practice? I'm expecting it makes Haskell more suitable for web stuff since that's where low latency is often more important than computational performance is.

Not yet since it's only on the bleeding edge of GHC. I have some games I've been building that I'll probably try it with though.

In what way do you think Haskell is bad for web use? I can't think of any runtime performance metric in which it doesn't crush Ruby or Python, and those are pretty popular for web apps.

Poor phrasing on my part. Certainly not bad in any respect for web stuff.

I merely meant that this is a welcome upgrade that specifically benefits web applications, even if it carries a minor computational performance penalty.

Ah, I see what you mean. It's a domain in which you're happy to give up a couple percent points of throughput to bring down the 99% latency, which that option will do. Not necessary, but it will be nice.

Sure but does it have web support like Django or Rails? There’s more to it than performance when it comes to web dev!

But a low-latency GC won't solve that problem.

Web support...?

He means an ecosystem where 99% of the work needed to build yet another CRUD app is done for you.

I mean the web eco-system that allows you to develop web applications quickly.

Yes it certainly does https://github.com/obsidiansystems/obelisk

[Disclaimer, I work at the company behind this.]

That looks pretty cool, I’ll try it this weekend!

Web stuff is pretty popular in Haskell already (I'd say "Web Stuff" is probably the biggest portion of production Haskell users these days), but then again it's also popular with many languages where people use throughput-oriented GC strategies vs low-latency ones. "Web Stuff" is a weirdly large class of applications these days, since it's basically "large scale server applications" that people are really talking about. But it will definitely close a big hole where one existed before -- there are users who had to abandon Haskell implementations of their server-side products because of it.

Yes, I'm also using Haskell for web APIs. It's certainly a great fit for that purpose.

I only meant that this low latency garbage collector has stronger positive implications in concurrent web stuff than in many other domains.

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