Paul Johnson <paul@cogito.org.uk> wrote:
Is there a market that is poorly served by the incumbent languages for which Haskell would be an absolute godsend?
Yes. Safety critical systems, encompassing everything from avionics to railway signalling equipment, to medical devices. These markets are relatively small / low-volume, with needs for high assurance, and better development times. However, despite these appealing characteristics, I would say Haskell is still currently unsuitable for those areas. * These tend to be embedded systems, with daunting memory, speed, and power-consumption limits. * Analysing and guaranteeing performance characteristics (time, memory) is something we still can't do well with Haskell. Note, this is not a question of raw speed, it is a question of hard guarantees to meet deadlines. In this field, a slow implementation that provably meets a deadline of 2ms is better than a fast implementation that claims a cycle time of .02ms, but cannot be shown to be failure-free. Regards, Malcolm