[Haskell-cafe] #haskell works

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

> No-one is writing a commercial Haskell compiler yet (although there is
> at least one commercial Haskell-like language). What I mean is, the
> amount of "commercial-oriented" funding spent on GHC (as opposed to
> the "research-oriented" funding spent by Microsoft Research and various
> research bodies) is, as far as I know, zero. Incentives matter. If
> there were a commercial Haskell compiler, maybe we would see faster
> progress.

It isn't just about money. It's also about ideas, luck and randomly
bumping into people. I am sure there is a great strategy for making
really fast Haskell compilers, and I am sure at some point we'll
figure out what it is.

I agree with Bulat that Haskell has, if anything, even better
optimisation potential than something like C. With Haskell you can do
the crazy high-level optimisations that things like C would demand
really advanced alias-analysis. Compare this to low-level
optimisations which in Haskell require strictness analysis but in C
are easy. At some point high-level will become more important than
low-level, when it does, we win :-)

Thanks

Neil