Re: "Lambda Dance", Haskell polemic,...

On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:

"Wojciech Moczydlowski, Jr" wrote,

...

IMO, what's also important, is an infamous memory consumption. Everybody seems to ignore it, but by now I wouldn't use Haskell in a commercial product, because of this little inconvenience. For me, it doesn't matter much if a language is slow - as far as it's not very slow, it's ok. More important for me is the predictability. I have to know how much memory my program will eat. And in Haskell, with ghc the only sure answer is: "Very much".

After profiling and removing space leaks? In what kind of applications did you encounter this problem?

I tried to profile my toy C compiler. The profiles simply didn't work - the graph didn't convey any informations. I've informed about the bug and let it go. And besides, after rough testing, it seemed that memory usage grows linear with a compiled program size. It was OK. But during the compilation of 200KB program, my compiler ate AFAIR about 30MB of memory.

This is - again - the problem of a lack of standard libraries. This is a problem, a very serious one, and it is being worked on. More hands => more solutions, faster.

I know that almost every problem Haskell has is caused by lack of people.

I found Simon Marlow's http server a quite convincing example of how Haskell can shine in an application that is very far from the typical applications in which functional

In a "Advanced functional programming" class at Warsaw University this year, the group is striving to write a DNS server in Ocaml. I'm curious whether they'll succeed.

Manuel

Wojciech Moczydlowski, Jr