[Haskell-cafe] killer app sought
Mark Wotton
mwotton at gmail.com
Sat Oct 3 23:08:49 EDT 2009
Hi,
I've been writing a little binding from Ruby to Haskell called Hubris (http://github.com/mwotton/Hubris
) which I think has some potential both for making Haskell web apps
easier to write, and also for bringing the more adventurous Ruby
programmers into the Haskell community. Code-wise it's coming along
nicely, and once 6.12 is out it'll run without modifications at least
on Linux (remains to be seen how long it'll take to get the Mac
patches into shape). My real problem is marketing: I need a killer app
that shows it's easy either to
1. wrap a kickarse Haskell library in a convenient Ruby web app shell
2. speed up a poorly performing Ruby web app
I've been badgering the Ruby guys in Sydney that I know on the second
point, but either none of them have performance problems, or none of
them want to admit it. The first is entirely possible - if you only
attack the subset of problems where your runtime is dominated by the
database and network latency, language performance is moot.
Conversely, if that's your worldview, the other problems that could be
attacked won't ever come to mind (to monstrously abuse the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis).
So, I'm asking you guys. What are some really nice Haskell libraries
or apps that could benefit from being shown off in one of the plethora
of slick, mature web frameworks that exist in Ruby? Manuel Chakravarty
suggested something with vector operations in order to take advantage
of his 'accelerate' library (once it gets a GPU backend, of course),
and more generally, something taking advantage of Haskell's support
for multicore would be cool. (The standard edition of Ruby is still
unicore, I believe.)
Parenthetically yours,
Mark
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