[Haskell-cafe] Why are OCaml and Haskell being used at these companies?

[Jon Harrop]

On Tuesday 13 November 2007 16:03, Laurent Deniau wrote:
> OCaml was used to write a meta-program which applies heuristics to
> minimize the runtime of the critical C code (i.e. the butterflies). This
> has nothing to do with FFT computation

No. The sole purpose of the OCaml code is to symbolically simplify the FFT 
computations and generate C code implementing the best results.

> FFTW doesn't need any OCaml compiler or lib to be compiled and installed.

No. FFTW contains around 13,000 lines of OCaml source code and you need the 
OCaml compiler to compile that.

If you don't believe me, perhaps you will believe Steven G. Johnson (one of 
the authors of FFTW) when someone tried to tell him that he hadn't written 
his software in OCaml:

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/fa.caml/msg/cfd08423c22ccff5

That OCaml code has millions of industrial users worldwide and is one of the 
most widely used pieces of software written in a statically typed functional 
programming language.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e