[Haskell-cafe] What *not* to use Haskell for

[Andrew Coppin]

Dan Piponi wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 11:08 AM, Andrew Coppin
> <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
>   
>> In other words, Haskell is an excellent language for designing
>> special-purpose compilers and interpretters for custom languages. ;-)
>>
>> If I knew a damned thing about IA32 assembly and dynamic linkage, I'd be
>> tempted to try it myself...
>>     
>
> You could generate assembly language instructions directly.

Yeah. I figure if I knew enough about this stuff, I could poke code 
numbers directly into RAM representing the opcodes of the machine 
instructions. Then I "only" need to figure out how to call it from 
Haskell. It all sounds pretty non-trivial if you ask me though... ;-)

[Don't some OS versions implement execution-prevention? Presumably you'd 
also have to bypass that in some platform-dependent way too...]

> But if you
> use the Haskell LLVM bindings your generated code will be (1) platform
> independent and (2) optimised. I think there's a cool project lurking
> there.
>   

Never heard of LLVM, but from the Wikipedia description it sound like 
warm trippy goodness. Pitty there's no Haddock. :-(

[From the build log, it looks like it failed because the build machine 
doesn't have the LLVM library installed. Is that really necessary just 
for building the docs?]