[Haskell-cafe] Crash!

[Derek Elkins]

On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 19:22 +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
> Tim Newsham wrote:
> >> The point is... I'm not doing that. Gtk2hs is, but that's a 
> >> well-tested library, so I very much doubt it's the source of the bug.
> >
> > I don't understand why Haskell users believe (perhaps are too often 
> > led to believe) that haskell programs can't crash.  Gtk2hs does a lot 
> > of native stuff.  Gtk's been around for a long time, but so has a lot 
> > of other software that has lots of bugs still present in it. Often 
> > these bugs lead to memory corruption and crashes.  Haskell does 
> > nothing to prevent this from happening (how could it?).
> >
> > I entirely expect that this crash is due to Gtk2hs (well-tested though 
> > it may be) or one of its underlying dependencies (such as libpng).
> 
> Nope. Actually it was me being dumb with unchecked array access. Nothing 
> wrong with GHC, GTK+ or even Gtk2hs.

I, for one, am completely unsurprised.  Haskell doesn't make you smarter
than you are when programming in C.  If you are using unsafe functions
you have a very significant burden of proof to acquire before you can
say it is the compiler or run-time or a mature library, though there are
certainly bugs in all of those.