Can Haskell Programming Language Outperform C as Hoskinson Suggests? (2024)
Cardano’s domain-specific language for financial smart contracts is built on Haskell, says Hoskinson
During the late 1980s as that is, the era of new languages and paradigms were invented. A group of researchers started developing Haskell a purely functional programming language. It was finally published in 1990. It is named based on a U.S. mathematician Haskell Brooks Curry. Haskell is a modern, standard, purely functional programming and non-strict language. It is Specially designed to handle a wide range of applications, from numerical to symbolic. It has an expressive syntax and very rich inbuilt architecture. Haskell is a purely functional, non-strict programming language. It is Specially designed to cope with large-scale industrial production applications. It is known for its rich built architecture. Haskell programs are written as Mathematical functions.
Haskell is very competitive with C, and on some benchmarks, it is faster. In C, it’s strict evaluation, you put a function there, and it executes one line at a time. It’s how you should think of C executing. It’s going to call this line. Everything on this line is going to finish before we get to the next line. In Haskell, that’s not the case. You can call something, give it a name, and it doesn’t actually do anything yet. The compiler can actually analyze it and a lot of times figure it out.
Some of the Features of Haskell that Make it Different from Other Programming Languages
Static Types
Haskell is statically typed. When you compile your program, the compiler knows which piece of code is a number, which is a string, and so on. That means that a lot of possible errors are caught at compile time. If you try to add together a number and a string, the compiler will whine at you.
Rich Types
Haskell uses a very good type system that has type inference. That means that you don’t have to explicitly label every piece of code with a type because the type system can intelligently figure out a lot about it.
Haskell is elegant and concise. Because it uses a lot of high-level concepts, Haskell programs are usually shorter than their imperative equivalents. And shorter programs are easier to maintain than longer ones and have fewer bugs.
Metaprogramming
Haskell supports the inspection and generation of the program’s abstract syntax tree. This feature is called Template Haskell, and it’s used for compile-time evaluation and to automate boilerplate generation.
What did Charles Hoskinson Suggest about the Haskell Programming Language?
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson recently engaged in a Twitter debate on programming languages with Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Elon Musk had been gently asked by a Tesla enthusiast to include software notes in the Tesla app. Elon Musk highlighted his hatred for contemporary C++ in his response to the Twitter user, but his fondness for plain C, which former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey concurred with.
“Just wait until you people discover Haskell,” said Charles Hoskinson, who contributed to the thread. Cardano’s smart contract programming language and Marlowe, the domain-specific language for financial smart contracts, are both built on Haskell. Cardano’s off-chain and on-chain codes are both written in Haskell. However, Haskell isn’t one of the most popular programming languages.
Cardano, on the other hand, selected Haskell because it believes its Plutus and Marlowe smart contracts can be properly built-in in a precise, formally proven language that delivers a high level of assurance right away. This follows the devastating effects of the resulting vulnerabilities, code failures, and smart contract exploits on blockchains and smart contract languages, which have resulted in substantial financial losses, generally in the billions of dollars.
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Then, you have something like Haskell that is often faster than C in the benchmarks. It's very close to C when it's not faster. It's not like, "Oh, it's twice as slow." No, it's right there, it's within a few percentage of C, and very often it's on the other side, it's faster than C.
Most of Haskell's downsides (as well as most of Haskell's upside) come from its two defining characteristics: It's lazy and purely functional. Being lazy makes it harder to reason about performance.
The reason Haskell was chosen is because Cardano systems are based on scientific peer reviewed research. In order to translate all that research into a system protocol you need to use 1:1 mapping with least amount of side effects.
This language compiles fast too. Rust runs faster than most other compiled programming languages like C/C++ because it has built-in support for hardware programming and uniform precision integers, so you can process very large integers in this programming language without overflow or loss of accuracy.
Haskell is perceived to be an impractical, academic language. Therefore, people refuse to use it and instead try to translate lessons they learned from it to "more practical" languages such as C++. If everyone was working solo and didn't need to justify their decisions to others, maybe Haskell would catch on faster.
Laziness is a key feature of the Haskell programming language. The main idea is that we only evaluate expressions when they are actually needed. Unlike Haskell, most programming languages implement eager evaluation.
Haskell. The language is named after a mathematician and is usually described to be one of the hardest programming languages to learn. It is a completely functional language built on lambda calculus.
Haskell is never really going to be a mainstream programming language. The larger programming ecosystem is entirely dominated by strong network forces that make it impossible for small community-driven languages to thrive, except in a few niche areas.
There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, Haskell is still primarily used in academia and research. There are companies that use it (see list above) however, even they struggle to find good candidates that have experience. It can be rather complex and so not a lot of new programmers will try to learn it.
The code is “denser” — each string often carries more information than in other languages, so it's harder to read for an inexperienced developer. Doctor_Ryner: When learning Haskell, you'll probably stumble upon this saying: “If it compiles, it's probably correct”.
The Cardano network was made to be versatile and inclusive. It chose Haskell as its core language, but at the same time, it created the tools to open the network for any alternative. The push is to enable various possible solutions while ensuring the same level of security.
The type system behind Haskell is a great tool for writing specifications that catch many coding errors. Your Haskell understanding will influence the way you look at programming: you will start to appreciate abstraction.
Unlike some other functional programming languages Haskell is pure. It doesn't allow any side-effects. This is probably the most important feature of Haskell. We've already briefly discussed the benefits of pure, side-effect free, programming - and there's not much more we can say about that.
Haskell does not generate particularly performant code. It is not competitive with C++, C or Rust which are the most performant languages across a broad range of problems. It has reasonable performance compared to other functional languages, but is typically not as fast as F#.
Haskell and similar languages should be very fast when compiled. But, in a more philosophic way, in an imperative language you tell the compiler "how to do it" and in a functional one you tell "what you want to get done". So, for functional languages, speed is something related on how smart is your compiler.
C++ is considered to be the fastest programming language in compilation with C. These languages are famous for building high-performance applications and allow finely tuned control of the overall code execution.
Python is a lot slower than Haskell. As mentioned earlier, Python is easier than Haskell to learn. The learning curve for Haskell is steep, especially for those with no prior functional programming experience.
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