Howdy, I'm considering building a desktop app using Haskell. The primary target for the app is Windows, but if it runs on Linux and Mac (Intel and PPC), that'd be a bonus. I've got a bunch of questions that hopefully folks can answer. Well, before I start, you might well be asking "Gee David, you're a Scala kind of guy... I mean, you're the primary contributor to lift... why not use Scala?" Well, I'm looking to build something that compiles down to native code and has a smaller download (and runtime) footprint than the JVM offers. I've come to love functional programming and am taking the current side project as an opportunity to learn Haskell. So... on to the questions: - Can GHC generate stand-alone executables with all the dependencies linked in such that I can distribute the single file without worrying about including a bunch of DLLs/SOs? The answer seems to be yes, but I wanted to confirm. - How much of a distribution footprint is the Haskell runtime? If I have a "Hello World" app, roughly how big will the EXE be (if one includes the JRE in the runtime, a Java/Scala program has a minimum footprint of 20M... that's big.) - Same goes for the runtime... I've looked at the stats on the Language Shootout home page and these look encouraging, but I wanted to see if the reasonable footprint is a reality. - How real/solid/stable is the wxHaskell widgets package? Is it being well maintained? Is there (okay... this is pie in the sky) an GUI Builder for it? - How are the Windows/COM bindings in Haskell... would it be possible to, for example, embed an IE Browser COM control in a a wxHaskell window? - I found a package to do HTTP requests in Haskell but it does not seem to support HTTPS. Is there an HTTPS client package for Haskell? - How are Strings internally represented? Are they single byte or multi-byte characters? How easy it is to translate to/from internal representation to UTF-8? - How's the XML support? Will the XML parser handle non-Latin characters and properly encode stuff? Does XML get parsed down into easily mappable/filterable collections? - Is there support for SHA256 (I saw an SSLeay package which had support for a lot of stuff, but not SHA256)? - I understand that Haskell has "a better approach" to parallelizing tasks, but I have not seen much about the actual manifestation of this... would someone be so kind as to give me a pointer? - On a related note, I have become a fan (via Scala) of Erlang-style Actors and asynchronous message passing. Are there any similar packages for Haskell? - I tend to do most of my coding in either Emacs or Eclipse... how's the Haskell support in either? Is there a preferred editor (I don't mean to start any wars here... :-) - Are there any production Haskell-based desktop apps of note? Anyway... sorry for the long list of questions. I look forward to hearing from you all and learning more about Haskell. Thanks, David -- lift, the fast, powerful, easy web framework http://liftweb.net