[Haskell-cafe] Re: A suggestion for the next high profile Haskell project

[Sebastian Sylvan]

On 12/18/06, Bulat Ziganshin <bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Simon,
>
> Monday, December 18, 2006, 12:08:49 PM, you wrote:
>
> > My view is that Haskell's performance is very seldom the limiting factor
>
> of course. when someone said about GPG i just mentioned that this project
> may be hihgly speed-dependent and this case Haskell is definitely not the
> solution

I highly disagree. Why would you want to write 99% of your code in a
tedious and error-prone way to get speed in 1% of your code? Isn't it
better to write that 1% of the code in a slightly more tedious way
(Haskell imitating C), or even call a foreign function for it?

Yes, if you just write naive Haskell code it will probably be slower
than C, but why on earth would you do that? There are significant
benefits (less bugs, better security) of using Haskell over C, and the
only benefit of C (speed) can be achieved where it matters by writing
low-level imperative style Haskell, or calling C directly.

I happen to think Haskell would be very well suited for this since the
current project seems to be plagued by problems typical for C, and
higly atypical for Haskell (book-keeping bugs, sometimes also leading
to security issues).

-- 
Sebastian Sylvan
+46(0)736-818655
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