"Lambda Dance", Haskell polemic,...

[Wojciech Moczydlowski, Jr]

On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:

> "Wojciech Moczydlowski, Jr" <khaliff@astercity.net> wrote,
> 
> > IMO, what's also important, is an infamous memory consumption. Everybody
> > seems to ignore it, but by now I wouldn't use Haskell in a commercial product, 
> > because of this little inconvenience. For me, it doesn't matter much if a
> > language is slow - as far as it's not very slow, it's ok. More important for
> > me is the predictability. I have to know how much memory my program will
> > eat. And in Haskell, with ghc the only sure answer is:
> > "Very much". 
> 
> After profiling and removing space leaks?  In what kind of
> applications did you encounter this problem?

I tried to profile my toy C compiler. The profiles simply didn't
work - the graph didn't convey any informations. I've informed about the bug
and let it go.
And besides, after rough testing, it seemed that memory usage grows linear
with a compiled program size. It was OK. But during the
compilation of 200KB program, my compiler ate AFAIR about 30MB of memory. 

> This is - again - the problem of a lack of standard
> libraries.  This is a problem, a very serious one, and it is
> being worked on.  More hands => more solutions, faster.

I know that almost every problem Haskell has is caused by lack of
people. 

> I found Simon Marlow's http server a quite convincing
> example of how Haskell can shine in an application that is
> very far from the typical applications in which functional

In a "Advanced functional programming" class at Warsaw University this year,
the group is striving to write a DNS server in Ocaml. I'm curious whether
they'll succeed.

> Manuel

Wojciech Moczydlowski, Jr