[Haskell-cafe] Re: Microsoft's Singularity Project and Haskell

[Serguey Zefirov]

2010/7/31 David Leimbach <leimy2k at gmail.com>:
> Haskell's great and all but it does have a few warts when it comes to how
> much real trust one  should put into the type system.
> Some compromises still exist like unsafePerformIO that you can't detect
> simply by looking at the types of functions.

Okay, you should look into modules' imports. This worked well for Ada
(as far as I can remember - but I didn't program, i just read a book;)
and wasn't concern back then and isn't now.

> In order to live up to the hype and the marketing around Haskell, really
> things like unsafePerformIO should not be allowed at all.

You can use Haskell to generate quite safe code and that generator
will use much of haskell type system while not suffering from
unsafePerformIO.

> The type of
> unsafePerformIO $ fireTheMissles >> return 3 ::Int
> is just Int after all.
> Does Singularity also have such back doors?

This is what new Microsoft OS Barrelfish does:
http://www.barrelfish.org/fof_plos09.pdf