[Haskell-cafe] Crash!

[Derek Elkins]

On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 17:16 -0400, John Dorsey wrote:
> Quoth Tim Newsham:
> > >Haskell programs with particular constraints (i.e. pure, total Haskell, 
> > >doesn't
> > >primarily call gtk...)
> > 
> > Yup, and that's a great thing that we should be evangelizing to
> > all potential users.  No need to go overboard and tell them that
> > there will never be a crash, though..  The robustness claim is
> > strong enough without embellishment.
> 
> Pure, total Haskell programs may blow the stack.
> 

Total is unnecessary (with regards to the earlier comment, not the
immediately preceding one.)

> Just what is the concise, compelling, unembellished claim regarding
> Haskell's inherent robustness?

The concise, compelling, unembellished claim is: if your "pure*" Haskell
program segfaults (or GPFs) then it's the implementation's fault, not
yours. [unless your OS/Arch is stupid]

This isn't unique to Haskell, every memory-safe language has it.

* "pure" as in "100% pure Java" which has similar claims