RE: [Haskell-cafe] Project postmortem
| Unless lightning strikes and tomorrow morning I figure out what's the | deal with the spurious Mac OSX crashes, I think this might be my last | network app in Haskell. I should really be spending time on the | business end of the app intead of figuring out platform differences | and the like. Joel, I think it's fantastic that you've been pushing on Haskell in the way you have. What I learn from your experience is that the *language* is pretty good for what you wanted to do (esp lightweight concurrency) but the *libraries* in the area of networking are lacking both functionality and (more particularly) robustness. I hope you don't abandon Haskell altogether. Without steady, friendly pressure from applications-end folk like you, things won't improve. It's incredibly valuable feedback. But I can see that when you have to deliver something next week you can't wait around for some someone to get around to fixing your problem. (They aren't paid either!) Maybe you can use Haskell for something less mission-critical, so that you can keep up the pressure? Meanwhile, let me utter my customary encouragement to the Haskell community out there: please pitch in and help! Haskell will only break into real applications, of the kind Joel has been writing, if we can offer robust libraries, and that depends utterly on you. Don't wait for someone else to do it. Simon
Hi, so sad, so true... At least haskell ideas sneak into mainstream languages under disguise (LINQ anyone?). C-Java-C# syntax that business "developers" and their bosses love so much is mandatory so the result lack the beauty we all know and appreciate, but it is kinda nice to see functional programming going mainstream at last. Maybe, "Lambda" is the IT buzzword of next decade :-). Jan -----Original Message----- From: haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org] On Behalf Of Simon Peyton-Jones Sent: 18 November 2005 10:17 To: Joel Reymont; Scotty Weeks Cc: Haskell Cafe Subject: RE: [Haskell-cafe] Project postmortem | Unless lightning strikes and tomorrow morning I figure out what's the | deal with the spurious Mac OSX crashes, I think this might be my last | network app in Haskell. I should really be spending time on the | business end of the app intead of figuring out platform differences | and the like. Joel, I think it's fantastic that you've been pushing on Haskell in the way you have. What I learn from your experience is that the *language* is pretty good for what you wanted to do (esp lightweight concurrency) but the *libraries* in the area of networking are lacking both functionality and (more particularly) robustness. I hope you don't abandon Haskell altogether. Without steady, friendly pressure from applications-end folk like you, things won't improve. It's incredibly valuable feedback. But I can see that when you have to deliver something next week you can't wait around for some someone to get around to fixing your problem. (They aren't paid either!) Maybe you can use Haskell for something less mission-critical, so that you can keep up the pressure? Meanwhile, let me utter my customary encouragement to the Haskell community out there: please pitch in and help! Haskell will only break into real applications, of the kind Joel has been writing, if we can offer robust libraries, and that depends utterly on you. Don't wait for someone else to do it. Simon _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
This would be a good new thread to discuss it ;-) On Nov 18, 2005, at 10:42 AM, Jan Stoklasa (gmail) wrote:
Hi, so sad, so true... At least haskell ideas sneak into mainstream languages under disguise (LINQ anyone?). C-Java-C# syntax that business "developers" and their bosses love so much is mandatory so the result lack the beauty we all know and appreciate, but it is kinda nice to see functional programming going mainstream at last. Maybe, "Lambda" is the IT buzzword of next decade :-).
On Nov 18, 2005, at 10:17 AM, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
I hope you don't abandon Haskell altogether. Without steady, friendly pressure from applications-end folk like you, things won't improve.
Nah, I'm just having a very frustrating Friday. I think I need some direction in which to dig and a bit of patience over the weekend. For example, What does this mean precisely? My take is that the GHC runtime is trying to call a C function. this much I gathered from the source code. It also seems that since I do not see another library at #0 then the issue is within GHC. Is that the right take on it? Program received signal EXC_BAD_ACCESS, Could not access memory. Reason: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at address: 0x3139322e 0x0027c174 in s8j1_info () (gdb) where #0 0x0027c174 in s8j1_info () #1 0x0021c9f4 in StgRunIsImplementedInAssembler () at StgCRun.c:576 #2 0x0021cdc4 in schedule (mainThread=0x1100360, initialCapability=0x308548) at Schedule.c:932 #3 0x0021dd6c in waitThread_ (m=0x1100360, initialCapability=0x0) at Schedule.c:2156 #4 0x0021dc50 in scheduleWaitThread (tso=0x13c0000, ret=0x0, initialCapability=0x0) at Schedule.c:2050 #5 0x00219548 in rts_evalLazyIO (p=0x29b47c, ret=0x0) at RtsAPI.c:459 #6 0x001e4768 in main (argc=2262116, argv=0x308548) at Main.c:104
It's incredibly valuable feedback. But I can see that when you have to deliver something next week you can't wait around for some someone to get around to fixing your problem. (They aren't paid either!) Maybe you can use Haskell for something less mission-critical, so that you can keep up the pressure?
I can't change who I am, I just gotta push the envelope. I would not have stood the pain of doing this project in Erlang, for example, what with all the nested data structures, etc. I'm not waiting for someone to fix my problem, I would gladly fix it myself if I understood where the problem is. It used to be fairly clear before when the stack trace pointed to one of the OpenSSL libraries. In this particular case I don't even know how to start debugging this. Do I set a break point in s8j1_info? But it's something else periodically, like s34n_info. Do I inspect the C code somehow? But how do I do that? How do I debug the GHC runtime? Thanks, Joel -- http://wagerlabs.com/
On Nov 18, 2005, at 2:17 AM, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
I hope you don't abandon Haskell altogether. Without steady, friendly pressure from applications-end folk like you, things won't improve. It's incredibly valuable feedback. But I can see that when you have to deliver something next week you can't wait around for some someone to get around to fixing your problem. (They aren't paid either!) Maybe you can use Haskell for something less mission-critical, so that you can keep up the pressure?
Here is some feedback on a negative experience I had with Haskell recently (really about the only negative experience :) I was playing with one of the Haskell OpenGL libraries (actually it's a refined FFI) over the summer and some things about it rubbed me the wrong way. I wanted to try fixing them but I really couldn't figure out how to get ahold of the code and start hacking. I found some candidates, but it seemed like old cvs repositories or something. I was confused, ran out of time and moved on. Why do I bring it up? If it had been obvious where to get an official copy of the library I could have tried sending in some patches to make things work the way I wanted. I'm a huge fan of darcs repositories, BTW. Thanks, Jason
Am Freitag, 18. November 2005 17:16 schrieb Jason Dagit:
[...] I was playing with one of the Haskell OpenGL libraries (actually it's a refined FFI) over the summer and some things about it rubbed me the wrong way. I wanted to try fixing them but I really couldn't figure out how to get ahold of the code and start hacking. I found some candidates, but it seemed like old cvs repositories or something. I was confused, ran out of time and moved on. Why do I bring it up? If it had been obvious where to get an official copy of the library I could have tried sending in some patches to make things work the way I wanted. I'm a huge fan of darcs repositories, BTW.
Hmmm, as the OpenGL/GLUT/OpenAL/ALUT guy I have to admit that I should really, really update the web pages about those packages. But anyway: Asking on any Haskell mailing list (there is even one especially for the OpenGL/GLUT packages) normally gives you fast response times. Without even knowing that there is a problem, there is nothing I can fix. :-) And don't hesitate to ask questions about the usage of those packages, because this is valuable feedback, too. Regarding the repository: The normal fptools repository is the "official" one for those packages. But IIRC, most GHC binary packages include OpenGL/GLUT support, so there is normally no urgent need for a home-made version. All packages are already cabalized, but I have to admit that I have never tried to build them on their own. Cheers, S.
participants (5)
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Jan Stoklasa (gmail) -
Jason Dagit -
Joel Reymont -
Simon Peyton-Jones -
Sven Panne