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Bend has no tail-call optimization yet. It is allocating a 1-billion long stack, while C is just looping. If you compare against a C program that does actual allocations, Bend will most likely be faster with a few threads.

Bend's codegen is still abysmal, but these are all low-hanging fruits. Most of the work went into making the parallel evaluator correct (which is extremely hard!). I know that sounds "trust me", but the single-thread performance will get much better once we start compiling procedures, generating loops, etc. It just hasn't been done.

(I wonder if I should have waited a little bit more before actually posting it)

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> (I wonder if I should have waited a little bit more before actually posting it)

No. You built something that’s pretty cool. It’s not done yet, but you’ve accomplished a lot! I’m glad you posted it. Thank you. Ignore the noise and keep cooking!

>> Bend has no tail-call optimization yet.

I've never understood the fascination with tail calls and recursion among computer science folks. Just write a loop, it's what it optimises to anyway.

Computer science traditionally focuses on algorithms. Divide-and-conquer algorithms are frequently much more clearly expressed as recursion. Quicksort is the classic example, also various tree operations.

I've never understood the fascination with programming languages among computer science folks. Just write machine code directly, it's what it compiles to anyway.

If they’re low-hanging fruit, why not do that before posting about it publicly? All that happens is that you push yourself into a nasty situation: people get a poor first impression of the system and are less likely to trust you the second time around, and in the (possibly unlikely) event that the problems turn out to be harder than you expect, you wind up in the really nasty situation of having to deal with failed expectations and pressure to fix them quickly.

That's how development under open source works. You can't please everyone.

There’s a big difference between developing something and announcing loudly that you have something cool; the developers have done the latter here.

Thats completely unfair. They have developed something cool, just with not all the holes plugged.

I think it's clearly pretty cool even if not as fast as people expect it to be

It is pretty cool milestone achieved, just not production ready.

This is very cool and it's being treated unfairly, though it's also obviously not ready for prime time; it's an existence proof.

To illustrate that, many people on here have been losing their mind over Kolomogorov-Arnold Networks, which are almost identically positioned; interesting idea, kind of cool, does what the paper claims, potentially useful in the future, definitely not any use at all for any real use-case right now.

(In part that's probably because the average understanding of ML here is _not_ strong, so there's more deference and credulousness around those claims.)

Dude we're running unrestricted recursion and closures on GPUs! If that's not cool to you, I apologize, but that mind-blowingly cool to me, and I wanted to share it, even though the codegen is still initial. Hell I was actually going to publish it with the interpreters only, but I still coded an initial compiler because I thought people would like to see where it could go :(

The closure part was when I had to stop for a moment and go "wait, really?! ... COOL!" and I'm definitely going to try and remember to check back every so often (emphasis on 'try' given I have a brain like a sieve but still ;).

I agree with you. But then there's the entire "release fast, don't wait before it is perfect". And, then, there's the case that people using it will guide us to iteratively building what is needed. I'm still trying to find that balance, it isn't so easy. This release comes right after we finally managed to compile it to GPUs, which is a huge milestone people could care about - but there are almost no micro-optimizations.

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