Yeah Atom is pretty slick, though unfortunately it's not quite powerful enough for much of the stuff that we do.

John Van Enk and I are actually working on a language that's similar to C (and compiles to C), but has polymorphism, type inference and other goodies. The goal is to make working on embedded systems a bit less painful, while still being able to do anything that C can do (like run on an 8 bit micro).
Hopfully, if things go as planned, we'll have a working beta out by the end of the month :)

- Job

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 5:58 PM, Don Stewart <dons@galois.com> wrote:
job.vranish:
> + 1
>
>
> This is probably the biggest obstacle to using Haskell where I work. (Aviation
> industry, software for flight management systems for airplanes)
>
> We often need to perform some computations with hard deadlines, say every 20ms,
> with very little jitter.
> Major GC's spoil the fun; It's quite easy to have a major GC take longer than
> 20ms, and currently they are not "pauseable" (nor is it trivial to make them
> so).
>
> It would be very nice to have some annotation/DSL/compiler-flag that would let
> me run a small block of mostly regular haskell code under hard, real-time
> constraints.
>
> Hmm, it looks like the HASP project is working on some of this, though I'm not
> sure how portable their work is back to GHC: http://hasp.cs.pdx.edu/
>

Or look at EDSLs, like Atom:

   http://hackage.haskell.org/package/atom