Good. BTW I don't think it's a good idea to write bindings for a widget set, because they're written in C, and could take bugs and segfaults.
I disagree rather strongly (which is why I've spent so much time over the last 8 or 9 years working on interfacing Haskell to C). It takes a lot of effort to develop a good library. You spend a lot of time on design, implementation, bugfixing, figuring out interactions with other libraries/ software, documenting it, writing tutorials, getting publishers to accept books about it, revising the design, performance tuning, etc. I don't think it makes sense to repeat that effort unless there is some clear benefit to be had. This benefit can include (in fact, usually consist of) things like getting a PhD, exploring a new design style, demonstrating feasability, etc. but it's hard to develop a product which is of higher quality than one in which so much time has already been invested. In the specific case of widget sets, two important goals are maintaining the same look and feel (whether one likes it or not) and maintaining the same interface with configuration mechanisms as on the system you are developing for. And, when Haskell is the implementation language, we should consider resource usage, long term memory behaviour and behaviour under stress: when the machine is thrashing, when handling exceptions, when the thread allocation limit is reached, etc. (I single Haskell out here because by making more things implicit than many other languages, Haskell makes it harder to reason about and deal with failure.) For this reason, I think it makes a lot more sense to incorporate existing libraries into Haskell and then build cleaner layers on top. -- Alastair Reid alastair@reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk Reid Consulting (UK) Limited http://www.reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk/alastair/