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

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Sun, Dec 11, 2005 at 02:25:55AM +0300, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> don't forget that real program will make a lot of I/O and use C
> libraries, so difference will be less and can be even close to 0.

I disagree that every real Haskell program has to do a lot of I/O and
has to use FFI. Most of the time I want to write my code in pure
Haskell, with 95% of it in pure functions. This has the advantage of
greater clarity and reliability (and more). 

What I fear about the future of Haskell, is that we will have so many
libraries FFIying to C, that our programs will crash as often as
programs written in C.

FFI is necessary, but IMO it shouldn't be used when it doesn't have
to be.

In an (mostly:) ideal world, every library should be clearly divided
into a small, trusted, unsafe core and the rest, written entirely in
Haskell.

I would like to see some support in tools for enforcing such a coding
policy. It could look like this - a function written using only safe
components would be marked as safe. Every unsafe feature like FFI,
unsafePerformIO, etc. would "taint" a module/function, marking it
unsafe. You could explicitly tag module/function as trusted/reviewed/etc.
There would be different levels of trust. All this would be propagated
through the libs and program modules. A Haskell IDE could mark
safe/unsafe/trusted code with different background color, etc. You could
get statistics about the proportions of safe/unsafe/trusted code.

Best regards
Tomasz

-- 
I am searching for a programmer who is good at least in some of
[Haskell, ML, C++, Linux, FreeBSD, math] for work in Warsaw, Poland