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

[Austin Seipp]

Excerpts from John A. De Goes's message of Thu Jan 08 12:14:18 -0600 2009:
> But really, what's the point? FFI code is fragile, often uncompilable  
> and unsupported, and doesn't observe the idioms of Haskell nor take  
> advantage of its powerful language features.

This is a completely unfair generalization. The FFI is an excellent
way to interoperate with an extraordinary amount of external
libraries, and if you ask me, it's *worth* taking those pieces of C
code and wrapping them up in a nice, safe haskell interface. I will also
mention that Haskell has *the* simplest FFI I have ever used, which to
me only means it's easier to get it right (the fact that there are
customized *languages* like e.g. cython to make writing python
extensions easier makes me wonder.)

I suggest you take a look at the haskell llvm bindings - they are
extraordinarily well documented, and the high level interface uses
*many* haskell idioms that make the library safe and easy to use:

http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/llvm-0.4.2.0

This code most certainly takes advantage of powerful features and
idioms that only Haskell can provide. Please do not take your bad
experiences with a few crappy binding (or not even crappy bindings,
perhaps bindings that just aren't very abstract) and extend them to
the bindings that are excellent with a sweeping statement like that.

Austin