Re: Conversion/porting to "mainstream" languages
At 2002-03-11 15:16, Mark Carroll wrote:
One criticism I've received of the suggestion that we use Haskell in our business is that some particularly large clients will demand code in some 'standard' language that they know they can deal with, especially if they end up stuck with the software and we stop supporting it.
That's very reasonable, actually.
How are others dealing with this? How big a project would it be to translate, say, from Haskell to C or Java?
Huge. IMO, you'd probably need to rewrite everything. On the plus side, Haskell is typically excellent for exploring any problem domain. So you might end up with better designed and more maintainable Java or C code than you would if you started from scratch. Or not. -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tuesday 12 March 2002 04:36, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
How are others dealing with this? How big a project would it be to translate, say, from Haskell to C or Java?
Huge. IMO, you'd probably need to rewrite everything. On the plus side, Haskell is typically excellent for exploring any problem domain. So you might end up with better designed and more maintainable Java or C code than you would if you started from scratch. Or not.
I would use the right programming language for the tasks at hand. You should not IMO consider porting from one language to another which has radical differences. You will find it almost impossible to make a faithful translation of code that is still comprehensible if you rewrite in C/Java. If there are resource critical tasks, you write them in C/C++. But with Haskell you can pull many tricks which would be otherwise very expensive. Using Haskell at the right level may actually save you a lot of time and money. Especially if you are doing a lot of symbolic processing somewhere. I would almost certainly want to have a high level interpreted environment that runs with a language such as Haskell or ocaml for complex projects ;) It all depends on the application. If you are going to be done with 10.000 lines of C++ code, in a well written and comprehensible way using Haskell might not help you too much. In fact, you will find it quite hard to do some of the everyday tasks in a new language... However, consider a project such as MONO developed by certain famous monkeys. (They like being called like that) How many lines of code? How many would it take if it were written in Haskell? That's exactly the kind of project where Haskell would save you a lot of resources. Look at the applications on your computer. Something a little too complex and it becomes 10's of megabytes in source code.... That's surely not needed. Thanks, - -- Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr> Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo GPG public key fingerprint: 360C 852F 88B0 A745 F31B EA0F 7C07 AE16 874D 539C -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8jWyPfAeuFodNU5wRApv9AJwILw5ND1I0pbe5sp59cMh5M0RPDACgjszi aHF6DDW7tCc1csu2Xhyfp7I= =vkgB -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
participants (2)
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Ashley Yakeley -
Eray Ozkural