Howdy,<br><br>I&#39;m considering building a desktop app using Haskell.&nbsp; The primary target for the app is Windows, but if it runs on Linux and Mac (Intel and PPC), that&#39;d be a bonus.&nbsp; I&#39;ve got a bunch of questions that hopefully folks can answer.
<br><br>Well, before I start, you might well be asking &quot;Gee David, you&#39;re a Scala kind of guy... I mean, you&#39;re the primary contributor to lift... why not use Scala?&quot;&nbsp; Well, I&#39;m looking to build something that compiles down to native code and has a smaller download (and runtime) footprint than the JVM offers.&nbsp; I&#39;ve come to love functional programming and am taking the current side project as an opportunity to learn Haskell.
<br><br>So... on to the questions:<br><ul><li>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.
</li><li>How much of a distribution footprint is the Haskell runtime?&nbsp; If I have a &quot;Hello World&quot; 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&#39;s big.)
</li><li>Same goes for the runtime... I&#39;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.</li><li>How real/solid/stable is the wxHaskell widgets package?&nbsp; Is it being well maintained?&nbsp; Is there (okay... this is pie in the sky) an GUI Builder for it?
</li><li>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?<br></li><li>I found a package to do HTTP requests in Haskell but it does not seem to support HTTPS.&nbsp; Is there an HTTPS client package for Haskell?
</li><li>How are Strings internally represented?&nbsp; Are they single byte or multi-byte characters?&nbsp; How easy it is to translate to/from internal representation to UTF-8?</li><li>How&#39;s the XML support?&nbsp; Will the XML parser handle non-Latin characters and properly encode stuff?&nbsp; Does XML get parsed down into easily mappable/filterable collections?
</li><li>Is there support for SHA256 (I saw an SSLeay package which had support for a lot of stuff, but not SHA256)?</li><li>I understand that Haskell has &quot;a better approach&quot; 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?
</li><li>On a related note, I have become a fan (via Scala) of Erlang-style Actors and asynchronous message passing.&nbsp; Are there any similar packages for Haskell?<br></li><li>I tend to do most of my coding in either Emacs or Eclipse... how&#39;s the Haskell support in either?&nbsp; Is there a preferred editor (I don&#39;t mean to start any wars here... :-)
</li><li>Are there any production Haskell-based desktop apps of note?</li></ul>Anyway... sorry for the long list of questions.&nbsp; I look forward to hearing from you all and learning more about Haskell.<br><br>Thanks,<br><br>
David<br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>lift, the fast, powerful, easy web framework<br><a href="http://liftweb.net">http://liftweb.net</a>