"D. Tweed" <tweed@cs.bris.ac.uk> wrote,
On Thu, 30 May 2002, Don Syme wrote:
going to provide. Given the general complexity of GHC, the longish compile times and the reliance of the GHC library implementation on C and C libraries in so many places I decided to implement a simpler language from scratch. I like the idea that a .NET compiler should be under 10K lines of code if at all possible, as is the case for F#.
Idle curiosity: which aspects of the Haskell language are the ones that make it complicated -- e.g., long-time stuff like lazy evaluation, typeclasses & inferrence, etc or newer stuff like functional dependencies, etc or something else entirely -- and do they only make it complicated in the context of the .NET architecture or in any implementation? (I'm just interested in that there's little chance of Haskell becoming more widespread if it's daunting enough to dissuade implementors.)
I think, the probelm is .NET, not Haskell. .NET just doesn't deliver on its promise (= marketing hype) of language neutrality. The problem is that .NET is language neutral only as long as all languages are sufficiently close to C#. Not just Haskell, but widely used languages like C++ run into this problem, too (see .NET's Managed C++). Cheers, Manuel