[Haskell-cafe] Haskell not ready for Foo [was: Re: Hypothetical Haskell job in New York]

[Don Stewart]

wchogg:
> On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 8:32 AM, John A. De Goes <john at n-brain.net> wrote:
> >
> > Haskell's networking support is very rudimentary. Erlang's is quite
> > sophisticated. For network intensive applications, especially those
> > requiring messaging, fault-tolerance, distribution, and so forth, there's no
> > doubt that Erlang is a more productive choice.
> >
> > Not because of the language, per se, but because of all the stuff that is
> > packaged with it, or available for it.
> 
> Now I understand that there aren't(?) any Haskell implementations that
> can act as distributed nodes the way the Erlang implementation can,
> but I'm not familiar enough with Erlang to understand what it has for
> networking that the Haskell network packages don't have.  Could you
> explain a bit further?  I've been thinking a lot about network
> programming anyway lately & am looking for library opportunities.

Note that there even exists an FFI binding to Erlang for Haskell, so
that Haskell nodes can seamlessly interact with other nodes speaking
Erlang's protocol format. 

There's nothing stopping you using Haskell nodes in a distributed
fashion, and indeed there are groups doing this.

-- Don