On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 11:14:18AM -0700, John A. De Goes wrote:
But really, what's the point? FFI code is fragile, often uncompilable and unsupported, and doesn't observe the idioms of Haskell nor take advantage of its powerful language features. Rather than coding through
That is an extraordinarily cruel, and inaccurate, sweep of FFI. I've worked with C bindings to several high-level languages, and I must say that I like FFI the best of any I've used. It's easy to use correctly, stable, and solid. If anything, it suffers from under-documentation. The whole point of FFI is to bring other languages into the Haskell fold. So you can, say, talk to a database using its C library and wind up putting the strongly-typed HaskellDB atop it. Or you can write an MD5 algorithm in C and make it look like a regular Haskell function.
You can indeed fit a square peg in a round hole, if you pound hard enough. That doesn't mean it's a good thing to do.
And with that, I fully agree. -- Joh