[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Newbie] Why or why not haskell ?

[Peter Simons]

Christophe Plasschaert writes:

 > With erlang or haskell, can we play with or implement
 > lower network fuction (routing daemon interacting with a
 > kernel) [...]

I can't speak for Erlang, but in Haskell you can. Through
the Foreign Function Interface, you can access arbitrary
3rd-party libraries or system calls, including pointer
arithmetic and the wonders of memory management.


 > In terms of speed, is haskell good enough ?

You have C/C++'s performance for algorithms that do things
the way you would do them in C. Once you start to rely on
lazy evaluation, performance may be really good or really
bad, depending on your algorithms. Practical experience
suggests that writing efficient algorithms in a non-strict
language is difficult at first. If you stay away from
infinite lists that map to an I/O stream through lazy
evaluation, however, you should be fine. ;-)

Peter