Polyglot Architecture: A Rational Approach to Software Design
- 1. Polyglot Architecture: A Rational Approach to Software Design Richard Minerich Senior Researcher at Bayard Rock @Rickasaurus
- 2. Research and Development Perspective ▪ A focus on long term solutions to complex problems ▪ A lot of room for experimentation, but decisions must be justified ▪ Very small teams, and so few resources for maintenance, and little time for production issues ▪ Talented people who are generally excited about learning new things
- 3. Why do we use the languages we use? ▪ I always use the same one or two languages. ▪ Pseudo-Technical management picks all of our technologies. ▪ I need to Maximize Synergy by Hadooping the Big Data Analytics. ▪ I am fanatically obsessed with a particular language. ▪ Weighted random sampling fed by the benchmark game. ▪ We came up with a set of criteria and judged several candidates empirically in context.
- 4. Considerations (oh god) Safety, FindingTalent, CPU Performance,Training, Platform Limitations, Compiler Support, Community, External Libraries,Tooling, Debugging, Primary Community Focus, Unique Features, Simplicity, Development Environments, Familiarity, Cross Platform Support, Asynchrony, Hype, Industry Standards, Algorithms,Tutorials, Data Structures, Stability, Memory Usage, Garbage Collection, Syntactic Flexibility, CompilationTargets, Language/Platform Interop,Taste, Core Libs, Code Clarity, Licensing, Error Messages, BuildTools, Testability, Requirements,Type Systems, Embeddability, Scalability, FaultTolerance, Parallelization, Binary Package Size, Permissions, Algebraic DataTypes, Obfuscation, Peer Pressure,Technical Debt, Does it have what plants crave?
- 5. Considerations (fixed) Safety – “In the limit”, cost of unexpected changes, testing burden, sanity of core libs, dependency handling Community – Support options, library quantity and quality, training, hiring, enthusiasm, culture of craftsmanship Performance – Relative dimensions include cpu, memory and network Tooling – Debugging, static analysis, linting, test frameworks And they’re all tradeoffs based on Context. i.e. Requirements, Platform(s),Team Skills, Available Funds
- 6. Case Study: 0install (by Thomas Leonard) Choosing a Replacement for Python Language OCaml PythonHaskell Rust ATS C# Go Speed 4 2 4 3 5 1 3 Dependencies 4 5 3 2 5 1 3 Bin. compatibility 4 5 2 2 4 5 3 Bad stdout 1 1 1 5 1 1 1 Missing env 5 5 5 5 5 3 1 Memory safety 5 5 5 4 3 5 5 Diagnostics 1 5 3 3 2 1 1 Ease of coding 4 5 4 3 1 4 3 Shared libraries 1 5 2 2 5 5 1 Static types 4 1 4 5 5 3 2 Privilege bounds 5 1 5 1 2 5 1 Mutability 4 3 2 5 4 4 4 C interoperability 3 3 4 4 5 4 4 Asynchronous 5 4 5 5 1 5 5 Total 50 50 49 49 48 47 37 http://is.gd/0install_language_shootout
- 7. What is Safety? (My favorite topic) Imagine your goal is perfect bug-free software (in the limit) ▪ Is the compiler your friend? ▪ Is it easy to write correct code? ▪ Will it “fail fast” when in an unexpected state? ▪ When things fail will it get up and keep going? ▪ Can you trust external libraries?
- 8. Context is everything ▪ Projected lifetime, time to market, burn rate ▪ Explicit requirements, technology interop, customer systems ▪ Current talent, willingness to learn, and training expenditure ▪ Previous purchases and existing platform limitations ▪ Domain problems that are helped greatly certain unique features
- 9. It Usually Comes Down To Unique Features ▪ JavaScript – Do we really have any other choice? ▪ C# – Great GUI builders, code generation tooling ▪ F# –Type providers, data modeling and transformation ▪ Matlab – Fast linear algebra, tons of high quality algorithms ▪ C++ (/CLI) – Library selection, managed-unmanaged interop Currently Under Consideration ▪ R – table structured data analysis and visualization, type provider ▪ Haskell – Unique libraries, fantastically safe ▪ Scala – Beautiful and concise leverage of Spark/Hadoop, quite safe
- 10. Isn’t writing your own language generally a bad idea? What I found for scripting options on .NET: IronPython, IronRuby, IronJS, DynamicLinq… DynamicLinq was almost exactly what I wanted. Almost… …If it weren’t for the darned manual conversions… … So after much consideration, I wrote Barb.
- 11. Barb?! (github.com/Rickasaurus/Barb) It’s a simple .net scripting language Name.Contains "John“ and (Age > 20 orWeight > 200)
- 12. Barb in Action: Safe Alert Manager
- 13. Slots to fill (Safe Alert Manager) ▪ User Interface ▪ User Behavior Model ▪ Data Access ▪ DataTransform ▪ Algorithms / Data Structures ▪ Ad-Hoc Behaviors ▪ Glue UI (C#) & Analysis (C#) Glue (F# and Barb) Data & Config In Data Out Algorithms (F#)
- 14. Key Insight: Reverential Transparency Matlab C++ Haskell R Python
- 15. F# Type Providers Typed Access to Data and Languages
- 16. MAP: Secure Distributed ML UI (JS),Analysis (JS & SQL) & Computation (F#) Glue (F#) Data Computation in F# or viaType Provider in: Matlab, R, Python Goal: Experts and users coexist in the same system with different tools. Typed Dataset Representation
- 17. MAP Language Choices ▪ User Interface / Model – Javascript/Type Script ▪ Analysis Data Access – BRSQL in the UI ▪ Analysis DataTransform – Javascript in the UI ▪ Glue – Almost entirely F# ▪ Algorithms / Data Structures – F#,Type Provider, C++/CLI
- 18. On the Horizon: Asm.js (with emscripten) is.gd/cool_asmjs_demos
- 19. On the Horizon: Rust www.rust-lang.org
- 20. On the Horizon: Julia julialang.org
- 21. Thanks for Coming! @Rickasaurus RichardMinerich.com Come visit the NYC Haskell and F# User Groups!