Benjamin Pierce
* What are the relative advantages of Hugs and GHC, beyond the obvious (Hugs is smaller and easier for people not named Simon to modify, while GHC is a real compiler and has the most up-to-date hacks to the type checker)? Do people generally use one or the other for everything, or are they similar enough to use Hugs at some moments and GHC at others?
Hugs is written in C, it's easy to build and doesn't use much ram/cpu/drivespace. GHC can be difficult to bootstrap for less popular setups (IBM Mainframes, BeOS, Amiga, etc), and both building and using GHC can eat ram/cpu/drivespace. On the feature side, Hugs is just that, a Haskell User's Gofer System. GHC is more like a hotrod research compiler, there's always some neat new feature in CVS that does really cool stuff. (ie Software Transactional Memory) If you have a Sharp Zaurus, Hugs will work but GHC won't.
* HUnit and QuickCheck seem to offer very nice -- but different -- testing facilities. Has anyone thought of combining them? (In fact, is HUnit actually used? The last revision seems to be a couple of years ago.)
I hacked up a test-first version of QuickCheck that saves failing test cases and checks them again on the next run. That is effectively a combination of HUnit and QuickCheck. I sent in my code when the call for QuickCheck2 ideas happened. I know there was a recent presentation on QC2 at Chalmers, but I don't know if the test-first idea will be integrated, or when QC2 will be released. My code is an inflexible hack I wrote as a proof of concept, it's definitely not ready for real use. PS. TaPL was great, on #haskell we call it "The Brick Book" Does it already have a standard nickname? -- Shae Matijs Erisson - http://www.ScannedInAvian.com/ - Sockmonster once said: You could switch out the unicycles for badgers, and the game would be the same.