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

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Tomasz Zielonka <tomasz.zielonka at gmail.com>:
...
| 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.

I spent some time recently trying to make a trivial text analysis
run fast enough to use it on large data sets.  I eventually achieved
a satisfactory result - twice as fast as simple awk and Python versions.

Of course I used the FPS packed string library functions, and I spent
a lot of time profiling.  One thing I found that way, is that FPS.words
iterates over the string byte by byte, in Haskell, but there's a function
(breakSpace?) that calls C to find the next space - and it's a lot faster.

On the other extreme, I have found it surprisingly painless to call
OpenLDAP functions from Haskell, which means I don't have to write my
own LDAP protocol in Haskell, but also SASL, SSL, GSSAPI and Kerberos.
The effort to do that would be enormous and eventually misguided, not
a good thing for Haskell programmers in any way.

So -- well, I actually agree with you in principle, but I'm just thinking
it depends a lot on when we decide we `have to' use FFI, and in the end
the advantages will very often be too compelling.  Even for basic data
manipulation without Haskell overhead, like FPS.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com