[Haskell-cafe] US Homeland Security program language security risks

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

Yitzchak Gale wrote:

> Perhaps Coverity's interest could be
> piqued if they were made aware of Haskell's emergence
> as an important platform in security-sensitive
> industries such as finance and chip design, and of
> the significant influence that Haskell is having on the
> design of all other major programming languages.

During one of Simon PJ's tutorials at OSCON last year, a Coverity
engineer was in the audience.  He told us afterwards that he downloaded
the GHC source and gave a try at analysing it while Simon talked.  He
didn't get far, of course; their software wasn't built for the tricks
that -fvia-C plays.  But they have at least one person who was that
interested.

However, it would cost several million dollars to produce a tool as
slick as Coverity's for Haskell (Prevent is really very impressive).
That would rival Coverity's R&D expenditure to date; they're a small
company.  I'd have a hard time believing that any such investment could
be recouped through commercial sales within the next decade.

	<b