[Haskell-cafe] Good news for Windows developers?

[Thomas Schilling]

On Sun, 2007-10-28 at 15:28 +0100, Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
> If I understand this blog correctly, F# leaves the research lab and
> becomes an "official" Visual Studio language?
> 
> http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/10/17/f-a-functional-programming-language.aspx
> 
> Okay it's not Haskell, but I think it's good news anyway... 
> 
> Cheers,
> Peter
> 
> PS: Shouldn't the Super Simons do some more PR at Microsoft so this
> also happens to Haskell?  ;-)  ;-) 

It requires a little more than just PR.  F# runs on .net/Mono and has a
second type-system layer for (.net-)objects.  Emulating those types with
Haskell's current type system would not be pretty and not accessible to
a wider audience (cf. O'Haskell).  Haskell's runtime likely doesn't map
well onto the .net VM, either.  (Laziness is rather slow without special
compiler and runtime support.)

Despite these difficulties, it's certainly not a bad idea working
towards fixing some of those issues, and make it easier to integrate
Haskell programs with programs running on VMs.  But it's a long road.

/ Thomas