[Haskell-cafe] Is Haskell a Good Choice for Web Applications? (ANN: Vocabulink)

[Anton van Straaten]

FFT wrote:
> On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 8:20 PM, Anton van Straaten
> <anton at appsolutions.com> wrote:
> 
>> The app is written for a client under NDA, so a blog about it would have to
>> be annoyingly vague.
> 
>> No doubt the potential for encountering space leaks goes up as one writes
>> less pure code, persist more things in memory, and depend on more libraries.
> 
> Exactly. I'm worried about, e.g. needing to use something as simple as
> a stream of prime numbers (see the recent thread about leaks there)

Haskell lets you easily create "infinite" lists, which is a powerful and 
useful feature.  But if you abuse that feature, you'll have problems, 
because you don't have infinite memory.  The further you traverse an 
infinite list, while maintaining a reference to its head, the more 
memory you use.  It'd be a stretch to characterize this as "hard".

I don't see much connection between this and the space efficiency of 
long-running programs.

I feel a bit like we're discussing a monster under the bed: "i bet it's 
huge! its teeth must be so sharp!"  Maybe we should just look under the 
bed, i.e. implement what we need and see what happens?

Anton