[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell not ready for Foo [was: Re: Hypothetical Haskell job in New York]

On 2009-01-08 12:10, Achim Schneider wrote:

Manlio Perillo wrote:

...

Unfortunately Haskell is not yet ready for this task.

Could you -- or someone else -- please elaborate on this?

I think Haskell is ready for a lot more than most people think. How about an operating system in Haskell, for example? I think House shows that it could be done. http://programatica.cs.pdx.edu/House/

I've heard it once in the context of a webbrowser, the reason given was that ghc doesn't deallocate memory, that is, the gc heap only increases. I doubt it'd be hard to fix,

Even if the GHC RTS doesn't return unused heap memory to the operating system, I don't see why this would prevent you from implementing a useful web browser in Haskell. As a comparison, my Firefox process currently uses 717MB of memory. I usually restart Firefox every day to bring the memory use down to a reasonable level. The situation would probably be the same if I used a browser implemented in Haskell. Incidentally, I did implement a web browser in Haskell back in the 90s, and it worked fine :-) But that was before JavaScript and CSS, so it would take some work to make it useful on the web of today... http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~hallgren/wwwbrowser.html Thomas Hallgren