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

[Bardur Arantsson]

Manlio Perillo wrote:
> John Goerzen ha scritto:
>> On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 10:36:32AM -0700, John A. De Goes wrote:
>> [...]
>>
>> On the other hand, I see nothing in Haskell that would prevent its use
>> for any of your purposes.  There are numerous high-level web
>> infrastructures already.  Perhaps they are more or less suited to your
>> needs, but that's a library issue, not a language issue.  
> 
> 
> The question is not about Haskell language.
> I think that Haskell is far better than Erlang, and in fact I'm studying 
> Haskell and not Erlang; and one of the reason I choosed Haskell is for 
> its support to concurrency.
> 
> The problem, IMHO, is with the availability of solid, production ready 
> servers implemented in Haskell, that can be used as case study.
> 
> The major web framework in Haskell is HAppS, if I'm correct, and yet in 
> the HAppS code I see some things that make me worry about the robustess 
> of the code.
> 
[--snip--]

Indeed. I've been looking for a Haskell HTTP server implementation that 
can actually handle file serving using strictly limited memory (for a 
simple UPnP server, as of yet unreleased) and that also doesn't leak 
handles like a sieve, but I haven't found anything yet. I don't know, 
maybe my hackage-foo is lacking. In the end I just rolled my own 
implementation using the HTTP package for parsing requests and doing all 
the socket I/O myself using low-level primitives. It seemed to be the 
only way to guarantee reasonable resource usage while serving 
multi-gigabyte files to fickle HTTP clients that like to drop 
connections willy-nilly.

Don't get me wrong -- the socket support is pretty decent, but there are 
also some weird idiosyncrasies, for example requiring that the PortNum 
is specified in network byte order and lacking a function to convert 
host->network byte order (hton).

Oleg's Iteratee does look very interesting though. Maybe I'll have a go 
at trying to use his ideas in my UPnP server.

Cheers,

Bardur Arantsson