Haskell is Faster than Rust! … Wait a Sec!

To evaluate the impact of memory management in Rust, I implemented a short benchmark in Rust and Kotlin. You can find all the details here and here. Measurements showed that Rust is roughly a factor of 10 faster than Kotlin, most probably caused by better handling of memory garbage. Being a big fan of Haskell, I was curious to see how the grand old lady of functional programming would compete against these two. So, I implemented the benchmark, did some measurements, and was surprised.

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Kotlin/JVM, Rust, and Randy Random

In this previous article I implemented a small, enterprisy benchmark to compare the concept of garbage collection used by Kotlin/JVM with the concept of Rust, which claims to not have any garbage collector at all. My conclusion was, that for a moderate increase in the complexity of the programming language the benchmark in Rust performed roughly 3 times faster than using Kotlin on the JVM. A colleague of mine, who uses Rust for some time now, looked at the code and gave me some hints for further speed improvements.

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Yes, Rust has Garbage Collection, and a Fast One

Rust is getting more and more popular. Thus, a group of colleagues, including myself, evaluated it for half a day to build up our own opinion, if Rust is of strategic interest for us or not. We did some coding following the standard introduction book, looked at some frameworks, and watched the presentation “Considering Rust”. The general conclusion was more or less in the line of: yeah, a nice new programming language, but without a full-grown ecosystem and without any garbage collection, it will be too cumbersome and unproductive for us in our projects. My gut feeling did not agree with the assessment regarding garbage collection. Thus, I did some more digging and testing and came up with my current conclusion: Rust does indeed garbage collection, but in a very clever way.

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Part 1: GraphQL with Spring Boot, JPA and Kotlin

GraphQL is a query language for dynamic queries on linked data. In the GraphQL world, there are many tutorials and documentation that illustrate the concrete introduction to GraphQL. Since getting started requires a lot of explanation, regular tutorials usually have a simple setup, which does not reflect the real world complexity. If additional technologies are added or the complexity of the project increases, these “Hello World” examples are usually no longer so helpful.

This article introduces GraphQL on the technology Spring Boot with JPA and Kotlin. I also present some best practices which I have learned while I have worked with it. You can find the source code here: https://github.com/akquinet/kotlin-spring-graphql

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Unbounded Functional Loops in Kotlin

This article is a follow-up to this previous article about bounded loops. Bounded loops are cool because they always terminate and usually it is pretty easy to estimate the computational time. But as every computer scientist, who had to understand the halting problem, knows, there is a big class of algorithms which are harder. These are known as the class of μ-recursive functions. Here, unbounded loops exists which can run forever. I will introduce how IMHO unbounded loops can be implemented in Kotlin in a functional way. And, of course, I could not resist and did some measurements…

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Java Optional and Kotlin Nullable

We are using Kotlin and Spring Boot in one of our projects. This includes Spring Boot Jpa Repositories. We are using a CrudRepository that provides basic functionalities like save(), delete(), findById() etc. This library is written in Java, hence method signatures look like this:

Optional<T> findById(ID var1); 

Using this API out of the box would force us to deal with cumbersome Java Optionals. Since we are implementing in Kotlin we would like to use Kotlin Nullables instead and as it turned out we can achieve this very easily.

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