Yeah but traditional ML languages are ass slow. If I want to write applications that are that slow, why not use something that targets the browser or something like Ruby or Python that has a much deeper ecosystem to leverage? Unless you’re just playing around with building a language and trying out different ideas or you think it’s better at some other axis (eg lower defect rate). But I’ve generally found that my incident rate for bugs doesn’t change with languages. What rust has done successfully and “ML” languages have not is how to engage a broader community by exploiting a weakness in some class of problems they can do better on that existing languages cannot. That’s why they shifted into systems languages. Memory safety in systems languages was critically important and ML languages are typically too slow and memory hungry so Rust adopted some of the C/C++ communities obsession with speed and memory usage philosophies while allowing for much safer code to be written. I think it’s safe to say they’ve finally dealt a “COBOL” like blow in that completely new code being written is unlikely to be C++ and C++ developer salaries will keep going up because it’s a difficult niche. will take a few decades to play out because C and C++ is so heavily entrenched. And who knows, maybe the memory safety efforts the standards body is taking will help but I think ultimately it will only be useful for hardening existing codebases but that’s a temporary patch on a bleed. Rust used that initial wedge to jam in a code repository, making testing and benchmarking easier, etc etc. some of the Rust libraries are insanely high quality and waaay easier to work with than in C++ land (even at Google and Facebook where it was a record level of easy)
I don't think ML languages tend to be that slow, depending on what you compare them with and which member of the family you are using for comparison.
If we have three stages: (1) system languages, (2) higher level languages like Dart, Java, C#, (3) very high level languages like Python and Ruby, then the those among the most popular languages in the ML family (OCaml and F#) comfortably occupy the same level as (2).
Maybe that's not what you're after. OCaml's more rare bytecode implementation (instead of native code) is about on par with Python and SML/NJ is pretty slow as well (although faster SML implementations like MLTon exist).
As someone that was introduced into ML languages via Caml Light in 1995, and has used a few of them since then, if the program is ass slow maybe the developer should have spent some time reading and practicing Algorithms and Data Structures.
