Malcolm Wallace wrote:
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.
Well, the market is growing and not that small. ;-) Think of mobile phones and cars, for instance, they are "full" of embedded computers.
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.
Well, is it a problem to make GC a deterministic task or there is a problem that a program may run out of memory unpredictably? Can you be more explicit, or link to some article? Regards Dusan